Old Letterbox DVDs Black Bars All Around

huston

I have some DVDs I want to back up but some of them are a weird form of letterbox: They are widescreen but DVDFab thinks they are 640x480. The end result is black bars all around the video. I've attempted to crop the black bars but they will just show up again in the output file. Worse, I end up with a strange (tiny) resolution. I'm currently having to encode to a cfr - 0 file, import into Blender to change the aspect ratio/resolution, and then ffmpeg to get the files into h265 (because Blender doesn't have h265 and DVDFab's converter's output isn't streamable to my TV). That is processing a video 3 times, very time-consuming and lossy.
This seems to be an issue of the file lying to DVDFab about its aspect ratio/resolution (it's also lying about its fps - says it's 29.97 when it is really 23.98), is there a way to get a full widescreen image using just DVDFab? If not, can we give Fab the ability to do what I'm doing in Blender so I don't have to use it?

october262

try this tutorial to remove the black bars - https://www.dvdfab.cn/tutorial/crop-...black-bars-en1

signals

They are 640x480 but they are what are called anamorphic transfers. This confuses Fab because of the way the IFO files are written. This used to be a fairly common problem and older versions of Fab had a control in Ripper Advanced Settings that could manually correct it, which I think was a slider called pixel pitch.

huston

They are 640x480 but they are what are called anamorphic transfers. This confuses Fab because of the way the IFO files are written. This used to be a fairly common problem and older versions of Fab had a control in Ripper Advanced Settings that could manually correct it, which I think was a slider called pixel pitch.
signals

Thanks for the info. I'm not seeing that option in the current version... is it gone?

I've started to mess around with the custom parameters but the information on Fab's site isn't very clear. I've figured out that "--sar 16:9" will stretch the video to the sides but not top/bottom (looks funny). I'm trying to see if I could tell it "--vf resize=720,480" but it isn't doing anything probably because my syntax isn't correct. Anyone know the proper syntax or other custom command that will get me what I'm looking for (maybe "--input-res 720x480)?

huston

So I've found that "--sar 4:3" seems to give me the best results. That stretches the image horizontally to fill the screen but it does not stretch vertically. The black bars above and below are larger than on most movies and yet the image doesn't seem "fat".