Widescreen DVDs with black bars on top & bottom

General Discussions
1

I’ve got quite a few DVDs that are widescreen, but the method used was to put a black bar on the top and bottom. This works fine on 4:3 TVs, but on my 16:9 TV, it leaves a boarder all around the movie.

Is there a tool or a Plex setting that will remove those black bars without reducing the clarity of the show? I’ll be using this on MKV files with MPEG4 contents.

My alternate method is to use WinX DVD Ripper Platinum and recreate the files, but I expect there will be some loss with this method.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

3

Yes, these are the worst DVDs. You are seeing black borders all around the picture because Plex thinks, this is a 4:3 video. It has no way to recognize the black borders.
White: the part of the video which has actual picture information on it
Black: the black borders on top and bottom, which are a part of the video picture
Grey: The area of your 16:9 screen which is also black, because the player wants to show you the complete area of the (supposed) 4:3 video

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  1. rip the disc with makemkv
  2. cut off the black borders with Handbrake

If you don’t want to rip the disc again: it depends on the quality of your original rip, how much the quality will suffer from the second compression in Handbrake.

4

cut off the black borders with Handbrake

That’s an option. The other option, for movies that I really like, is to replace the DVD with a Blu-Ray :slight_smile:

Actually, I was hoping that there was an app that someone created to do this cleanly and efficiently. Oh well.

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