Is there a simple program to re-encode widescreen video files with letterboxes?

[CZroe]

I've got some MPGs and WMVs that are 16:9 and need to be 4:3. I HATE cropping 16:9 (Worse than "Pan 'n Scan" butchering) and I hate the squished/stretched image that I'm getting now (A 4:3 Portable Media Center trying to play a 16:9 file from the 'net).

I would like to scale the video down and re-encode with letterboxing to make it 4:3 aspect ratio. In DVD-speak, that's making a non-anamorphic widescreen recording from an anamorphic widescreen recording.

 

[DurocShark]

Doesn't CuCuSoft do that? I forget... (Don't have it installed anymore.)

 

[CZroe]

It has a checkbox for "Keep Aspect Ratio" but it certainly does not work. Grumble.

 

[CZroe]

It CAN however keep the correct aspect of PAL vs NTSC (Minor 48-line variation). The output quality sucks ass though.

 

[woowoo]

Letterbox is your only choice

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: woowoo
Letterbox is your only choice

Actually, I WISH that were a choice because that's exactly what I want. I've been searching for almost a week now for a simple utility that will add letterboxing to various video files... I don't even care what format it outputs it as as long as it doesn't require Quicktime or RealPlayer.

Every utility I've found that has a "Preserve aspect ratio" or "Fix aspect ratio" option, it only references the aspect differences between standard NTSC and PAL and will squish the video to one or the other. I get it with vertical pillarboxes if I try to preserve the aspect ratio and convert to NTSC because it's not treating the source as 16:9 (The option wasn't meant to).

This is ticking me off immensely. I'm going to have to get a professional video suite spend a month learning it just to add letterboxes to the video manually after calculating all sorts of crap like NTSC vs PAL and more just so I can put funny videos and crap on a portable device. NOT WORTH IT.

One thing that strikes me as odd is that it is the exact same resolution as standard PAL except it is widescreen 16:9. It's like a flag is set in the header and WMP is expanding it to 16:9 (It's actually a flag defining each pixel as being 16:9). The applications and utilities just refuse to take this into account it seems.

 

[Goosemaster]

TMPGEnc

 

[CZroe]

Ah. TMPGEnc did the trick. The problem is that the commercial version DOES NOT. Why is the free version more capable than the commercial version?

 

[MDE]

Software or Video Forum

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: MDE
Software or Video Forum

I did make a thread there before this one. It went nowhere.

Anyway, using TMPGENC it would still have to re-encode as MPEG and then transcode to WMV for the sync. The quality was still OK. I would have preferred to output as uncompressed RAW frames and then encode to WMV during the sync but I was unsatisfied with the low frame rate on all synchronized content anyway. I found MPMCEncoderzx. It works great! Only problem was that the default (second-highest) quality setting ended up with much more color-banding and artifacts than the TMPEGENC+WMP10 sync to WMV. I had to choose the "Extreme" option for good results, but the file size was still nice and puny.

 

[Anubis]

will virtualdub do it?

 

[jarfykk]

http://divx.ppccool.com/

Works great for my handheld video needs. Don't recall a letterbox feature, but it does everything else. At work now so can't check. G'luck,

 

[0roo0roo]

kinda sad it resizes all stuff regardless of whether its correct bleh

 

[woowoo]

Avid dv should do it.

 

[CZroe]

It doesn't ALWAYS.

When I encoded straight to WMV using WMEncoder9, the synchronize process in WMP10 simply copied it over and there was no "Converting" progress bar. Sure enough, when I copied it back to my PC through the drive letter that shows up it was the exact same video file and quality. If I had encoded the same video to MPG I would have had worse results (the resulting WMV after sync would be a very low frame rate).