How to crop sides of movie?

[Zune]

I'm a relative newbie & have been using the guidelines in the GordianKnot userguide to encode DVDs to DivX (5.0.2). I recently encoded my copy of Gladiator onto 2 CDs & it worked great (as have most of my other encodes). Gladiator is recorded in 16:9 format, & as I don't have an HDTV or Wega-type TV, it looks very long & thin. How can I re-encode it by cropping the sides so that it fills a TV-type screen a little better? I don't mind the 16:9 aspect ratio when I play DVDs on my TV, but when I watch them on my laptop they look a little small. Thanks for your help.

EyeMD
London ON Canada

[jggimi]

You might be better off using an .avi player that supports "pan & scan" functionality, such as BSPlayer.

I think it would be tough to do that in an encoder (vdub, avisynth) because your cropping values have to change on the fly.

If you've not yet read through it, you might check out Doom9's "Aspect Ratios Explained" in his DVD Basics section. He describes the pan&scan process used to make fullscreen transfers.

[TheWEF]

i don't seem to understand the question and the answer. :confused:

just use gknots crop-function and crop off as much as you want...?

wef.

[sillKotscha]

download MPC (MediaPlayerClassic by Gabest), load your 'Gladiator.avi'... While it's playing 'right click on the movie' and hit: 'video frame -> touch window from outside'.

That's it :D

Sill

[amoeba]

While just cropping into the picture like TheWEF said will get you your 4:3 aspect ratio it isn't actually correct pan & scan. In the actual process the most important part of the frame is kept it's not actually just cropped the same amount each side however doing what TheWEF said is the best u can do without some sort of professional pan&scan application.

[OvERaCiD23]

just crop more in GKnot, but you won't gain that much resolution unless you significantly cut into the frame. possibly try using ZoomPlayer and zooming the movie to your liking. this way you have a good encode (full resolution, so you don't regret it later), but can watch it with the full frame on your TV and zoomed into a larger size on your laptop.