Crop black borders of TV Show - possbile?

[bong.tv]

I like to crop the black borders of a recorded TV Show. I transcode with VLC and X264 but found until now NO working solution :confused:
Like in handbrake possible, I like to maintan the aspect ratio and the original size. My video is a MPEG with a width: 720 and a height of 576 pixel. I like to get a H.264 encoded MP4 with no black borders in the same size.
I encode in the terminal, so a working parameter would be great.

[thewebchat]

If you crop, there is no way to maintain both the original aspect and original size.

[Skelsgard]

Maintaining 720x576 size might usefull if you're gonna transcode to DVD or want to keep the highest possible framesize in the final product, otherwise the image is either 4:3 or 16:9 DAR, so resizing is gonna be done eventually at pre or post-processing.
It your using DAR flags for proper AR decoding, than it doesn't really matter if the image is not 720 pixels width.
Just be sure to use mod16 resolutions for better compression.

[bong.tv]

ok, I understood. Thanks.
Can you give me an X264 parameter example to crop some pixels?

[Skelsgard]

x264 doesn't do processing, just encoding. You'll need other tools to crop those pixels, I would recommend AviSynth, which x264 accepts as input (file.avs).
Being AviSynth a script-based frameserver, it would allow you to do on-the-fly processing without the need for an intermediary AVI file (saving both time and HDD space).

[m3mbran3]

Have a look at MeGUI, it's a gui for x264 encoding and it makes it easy to crop / resize before encoding while maintaining aspect ratio.

[smok3]

If you crop, there is no way to maintain both the original aspect and original size.

why not? you'd need to crop properly and upsize (but thats probably a bad way of doing things).

[Skelsgard]

why not? you'd need to crop properly and upsize (but thats probably a bad way of doing things).

I think the key word is "original". The original size will be lost.