Letterboxing: To Crop or Not to Crop?

[Dark Morford]

I want to encode some of my Blu-ray movies to put on my iPhone/laptop for a vacation soon. I managed to rip them okay, but now I'm not quite sure how to go about things at the encoding stage.

Most of these movies are 2.40:1, which means they're letterboxed to fit a standard 16:9 display. I know I want to down-res to 720p for filesize reasons, which means I have two options: let the letterboxing stand and have a nice 1280x720 video, or crop out the bars and wind up with a weird resolution like 1280x533.

Using x264 with a CRF specified, is there a significant filesize/quality advantage to cropping the letterboxing? Would the unusual resolution affect device compatibility? Is there a de facto "standard" way to do it?

[sneaker_ger]

Using x264 with a CRF specified, is there a significant filesize/quality advantage to cropping the letterboxing?

If the bars are totally/digitally black: not really.

Would the unusual resolution affect device compatibility?

Probably not. Some devices would stretch them to 16:9, though. You should test your device.

Is there a de facto "standard" way to do it?

No. Most people around here seem to indeed crop for their mkv/mp4 files.

[Ghitulescu]

Using x264 with a CRF specified, is there a significant filesize/quality advantage to cropping the letterboxing? Would the unusual resolution affect device compatibility? Is there a de facto "standard" way to do it?

Crop and/or letterbox so that the final framesize (with a PAR of 1:1) will match those of your iphone. So follow the guides of BD/DVD to AVI/MKV and you're done.

The laptops should cope with the original (not re-encoded) files much better than the iphone.

[detmek]

I want to encode some of my Blu-ray movies to put on my iPhone/laptop for a vacation soon. I managed to rip them okay, but now I'm not quite sure how to go about things at the encoding stage.

Most of these movies are 2.40:1, which means they're letterboxed to fit a standard 16:9 display. I know I want to down-res to 720p for filesize reasons, which means I have two options: let the letterboxing stand and have a nice 1280x720 video, or crop out the bars and wind up with a weird resolution like 1280x533.

Using x264 with a CRF specified, is there a significant filesize/quality advantage to cropping the letterboxing? Would the unusual resolution affect device compatibility? Is there a de facto "standard" way to do it?
Just crop. Player will add black bars during playback if those are needed. And use at least mod 2 resolution, ie. 532 or 534 for height, not 533.