Changing 16:9 movie in 4:3 window to straight 16:9

[CNLiberal]

I have a couple DVD movies (The Abyss, Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country) that are 16:9 (or 2.35:1) movies in a 4:3 screen. Is there a way I can re-encode these as simply 16:9 so they fill up the entire screen on my 16:9 LCD? I don't want to lose any quality in this process. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 x64. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Jim

[nm]

I'd suggest using a player that supports automatic or manual cropping of the letterboxed video so that it can be scaled to full screen. For example with MPlayer, use the crop filter, -panscan parameter or "w" and "e" keys during playback. XBMC supports automatic detection and cropping of letterboxed video. For Xine, there's an autoscale plugin that comes with VDR's Xineliboutput.

If there's some other reason to rip the discs, simply crop while re-encoding. You can always encode at a bitrate high enough to keep the result transparent (= as good as the original in normal viewing conditions). Use Avidemux or perhaps Handbrake (with the new Linux GUI). Both allow you to crop the video easily and then encode with x264.