Not sure if this will make sense, but figured I’d throw it out there.
TLDR at the end
I, like many others, like to rip discs at full quality to watch on my main media TV. I use Plex on other TVs/devices to watch those files too. When I watch a BR rip on my Android phone (wider than 16:9), it will have black bars on the right and left because for some reason I can’t fathom, disc producers didn’t learn from the anamorphic DVD era. As such, Plex, dutifully transcodes the movie but doesn’t remove the top and bottom bars so I have the described bars on the right and left. I made a post about this some time back before I realized what the reason was.
One option would be for me to reencode all those movies to remove the top and bottom bars and either have 2 versions (a waste of storage space I would argue) or simply replace the original version (losing some level of “quality”).
However, when I do use Handbrake to reencode a movie, it seems it is easy for that program to identify black bars on the top and bottom of the movie and, when encoding it, essentially make it anamorphic such that it best fills whatever screen I watch it on (relevant on an Android phone that is wider than 16:9). That way, those that keep full quality rips could use those rips for that purpose, but could also use with Plex to transcode when needed to a phone, for example, but not have bars at the sides.
TLDR; My question is, when transcoding, would it be possible to have Plex identify and remove on the fly (in some way like Handbrake does) the bars at the top and the bottom? Would be nice if possible.
Edit - This issue doesn’t affect 16:9 devices. Primarily for phones that have different display sizes, the resulting video frame could be best fit to the maximum size of the display without having to change the “zoom” setting of the phone app. It would function the same way a reencoded video would.
