Way to often I come across a poorly encoded film. It seems that today’s Blu-rays are being encoded, by default, in 16:9 regardless of the source material. With 99% of films, that leaves black bars. This is no problem when watching on a 16:9 monitor, but with other aspect ratios, you end up with black bars on all four sides of the picture, which is rather unfortunate. To combat this, VLC has the handy feature of crop to aspect ratio. A simple menu to set which aspect ratio the film is originally in, and then crops accordingly. This removes the great hassle of re-encoding after ripping with MakeMKV.
My suggestion would be to have aspect ratio settings for each individual film, such that it does not have to be set more than once. I have left two screenshots to visualize the issue.
i also use the crop feature in vlc to make movies fit my 2.39 scope screen. i use plex but can not in my dedicated home theater because it lacks this feature. would love to see it implemented though!
Yes, Plex has troubles with movies like this. I run into it with a few rips of DVDs produced in the '90s. I’m not sure of the right term, but it is a way of squeezing 16:9 movies into a 4:3 window.
Straight DVD rips, via MakeMKV, end up with bars on all four sides. Two that I have are DVDs of “The Hunt for Red October” and “The King and I.”
As a workaround, I run such files through Handbrake. It picks up how the files are stored on the DVD and adjusts appropriately.
You might have to make some manual adjustments. For example, with “The Hunt for Red October,” the foreign language subtitles (when they speak Russian), appear in the black bar below the video. Standard settings in Handbrake cut this off (on my DVD anyway). I have to manually adjust the crop settings to leave room for the subtitles. An alternate solution is to convert the forced subtitles to SRT, via SubtitleEdit or similar tools, then burn them in when transcoding with Handbrake.
