Re: [Semi-OT] Cropping a letterbox MPEG-2 file is easy enough...

[Phil Requirements <simultaneous@comcast.net>]

On 2010-12-10 22:03:55 -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> But how do I save the output?
> 
> After reading the mplayer and ffmpeg man page and Googling, these
> are the three methods I tried, but none of them work.
> 
> $ mplayer foo.mpeg -vf crop=720:352:0:64 \
>     -dumpstream -dumpfile bar.mpeg
> 
> $ mplayer foo.mpeg -vf crop=720:352:0:64 -o bar.mpeg
> 
> $ mencoder foo.mpeg -vf crop=720:352:0:64 \
>     -ovc copy -oac copy -o bar.mpeg
> 
> $ ffmpeg -i foo.mpeg -vf crop=720:352:0:64 \
>     -vcodec copy -acodec copy bar.mpeg

How about this one:

    mencoder foo.mpeg \
    -vf crop=720:352:0:64 \
    -oac copy \
    -ovc lavc \
    -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video \
    -o newfile.avi

This one is a little tricky, because mencoder will transcode
your file if you're not careful. So this part...

    -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video

...needs to change according to what your source material is.
I think the above might work for DVD material?

> (Yes, Handbrake makes the job trivial, but no, I don't want to
> transcode the file, just "crop and save".  Disk is cheap and I want
> to retain DVD quality.)

I also hate to have quality degraded, which happens very easily
with videos.

Hope this helps,

Phil