best way to crop an mpg/vob/etc

[woldise]

im trying to crop a mpeg file, currently in svcd format. im planning on authoring to dvd, but i want to add black borders on top and bottom. so what would be the best app to do this. TIA

[Guest]

Forum rule 12: Do not ask what's best.

[woldise]

ok sorry. whats the various ways that one can go about cropping/masking mpeg files.?

[D3s7]

use avisynth.. www.avisynth.org for info

[woldise]

using avisynth would involve converting to avi? i havent found a truely lossless codec that would let me convert to avi without loosing quality. any suggestions?

[D3s7]

maybe you need to read the documentation on avisynth....

there's no conversion to avi needed anywhere in the process
avisynth is a frameserver which allows other formats (mpeg2,mpeg,etc) to be served to cce/other apps

[Darksoul71]

@woldise:

using avisynth would involve converting to avi? i havent found a truely lossless codec that would let me convert to avi without loosing quality. any suggestions

AVISynth works as some sort of "virtual AVI". The source material get´s decoded, filtered and passed through to the encoder of your choice without intermediate saving to a lossy codec. Huffyuv would work for lossless saving so far.

Keep in mind that it is technologically not possible to crop MPEG2 without re-encoding. The same goes for AVI, WMV, etc.

For cropping, resize and letterboxing I would suggest you have a look at FitCD which is a bit complicate to use but provides very exact results. You are able to crop and resize macroblock-optimized.
-D$

[woldise]

Thanks for everyones help. I dont think im ready to endulge myself into learning avisynth atm. Mostly due to lack of time, but I did however get the job done with vdub mod and frameserving to cce. Maybe one day soon ill take the time to learn avisynth in depth, from what i read it would be worth the time.