Cropping Black Stuff

[Shibblet]

On many DVD's there are black areas included in the video. Some areas are on the side, some are on the top and bottom. Mostly this is there to accommodate the aspect ratio of the film. I get the whole ITU / Anamorphic Jazz.

What I am looking for, is a utility that will allow me to open my ripped DVD (I usually use MakeMKV) and see where the black areas are, and know what the number of pixels is to crop the area in Handbrake. Handbrake does this "automatically", but it's not always accurate, and this is not due to any fault of HB, it's just detecting blurred lines, and folded video lines is not easy to do.

I've been using AviDemux, but it can take upward of 10 minutes just to open up the flippin' video for me to see the area to crop.

Handbrake for Mac and Linux has the preview option that allows you to visually crop, and I know that it's coming to Windows. But in the meantime, I'd like to know if there is something I can use that will allow me to do this without spending 10 minutes or so waiting on an app to just show me the crop area.

[Deleted User 11865]

IIRC the nightly builds have static previews, but it's still considered experimental.

Also, you can increase the accuracy of HandBrake's autocrop by increasing the number of preview pictures during scan, it's set somewhere in Tools > Options.

[Shibblet]

Also, you can increase the accuracy of HandBrake's autocrop by increasing the number of preview pictures during scan, it's set somewhere in Tools > Options.

Thanks! I didn't know about that.

I still have one small issue on some DVD's. There is like one or two lines of pixels at the top that look folded over, and I usually crop those out. However, the black detection never picks those up, obviously, because they aren't black or dark. Sometimes though, the autocrop sometimes picks up areas that don't exist.