[Mugenstylus1]

I'm not sure where to put this but if this isn't in the right area i'm sorry.


I have a media server currently up to 5tb, and I stream to WDtv's



It is mostly filled with blu-ray back ups, that are encoded with x264 coded .mkv container.


My main question is should I crop out the black bars at the top and bottom of the the 1080p movies?

 

[sean_w_smith]

if you want to. Its gonna take a ridiculous amount of time.


My personal choice is hell no. Personally I want to watch movies the way they were intended not the way they look after some user (not the director) starts chopping parts of the picture off.


many players you can adjust the zoom etc while playing like XBMC making this is a lot simpler...


Sean

 

[Mugenstylus1]

Thank you for your response.


I already encode the movies to x264 codec so time really isn't a concern. I usually do the encoding over night, or while I am at work. but while I encode should I crop? as is there any benefit to cropping ?

 

[sean_w_smith]

no there is not benefit, IMO. you're changing for the worse the picture the artist created plain and simple. I can't see how that would ever be an inprovement to throw away information the artist intended you to see.

 

[Alx330]

You don't need to as x264 has no problems with black borders unlike XviD.


Also a lot of encoders have very flaky Blu-ray cropping support so you usually have to do it manually as any auto system is unreliable.

 

[smitbret]



Quote:
Originally Posted by sean_w_smith /forum/post/20876614


no there is not benefit, IMO. you're changing for the worse the picture the artist created plain and simple. I can't see how that would ever be an inprovement to throw away information the artist intended you to see.

WTF?! The artist didn't intend for you to see black bars. They were just put in there post processing to make sure that the average 16:9 tv displays everything correctly. I'm about 100% sure that he didn't shoot the movie with the black bars and I'm about 99.9999% sure he didn't stand over the editors shoulder and say, "That's nice, but could you add some black bars on the top and bottom? The letterbox will make my film look more epic."


Your tv will add the letterbox automatically, anyway.


That being said, I use Ripbot264 to crop, but generally, I only do it if I am going to be reencoding anyway (convert VC-1 to AVC or burn subtitles). The black bars take up very little space on the HDD, there's really no advantage to cropping them out other than just to crop them out.

 

[sean_w_smith]



Quote:
WTF?! The artist didn't intend for you to see black bars.

Beleive it or not they actually did intend for you see the black bars.

 

[RockyF]



Quote:
Originally Posted by sean_w_smith /forum/post/20880465


Beleive it or not they actually did intend for you see the black bars.

We're kind of getting into semantics here, but no, the director and/or cinematographer did not intend for you to see black bars. They framed the movie in the intended aspect ratio to be seen in a theater on a screen that is masked to match the aspect ratio. The black bars appear when the film is then transferred onto BluRay (or DVD) and then shown on a screen that is a different aspect ratio than the film is intended. In any case, I think you're missing the point of the question, I think the original poster intends to leave the film in the original aspect ratio, he's just asking if the bars need to be included in his encode, or just let the display correctly show the intended aspect ratio.

 

[Brajesh]

If all you want to do is end up with a MKV of the movie w/o the black bars encoded in the resulting file, use the freeware BluRip. You'll still get black bars when viewing the movie, but it won't actually be part of the re-encode itself.

 

[aaronwt]

Sounds like more work for just a small amount of savings.

 

[Brajesh]

Yes and no. I have over 1,200 movies, so can't afford to do 1:1 rips for all that are BD sourced. Storage is cheaper than it used to be, but as I use WHS and it uses folder duplication, everything takes up twice as much space. Add TV shows and music collection, it starts to really add up. So, by re-encoding some that are less action-driven type movies, I can end up with a 2-hour 1080p movie around 9-10GB or 720p around 5-7GB. And, the quality is excellent if using CRF18 setting in BluRip.

 

[aaronwt]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Brajesh /forum/post/20886317


Yes and no. I have over 1,200 movies, so can't afford to do 1:1 rips for all that are BD sourced. Storage is cheaper than it used to be, but as I use WHS and it uses folder duplication, everything takes up twice as much space. Add TV shows and music collection, it starts to really add up. So, by re-encoding some that are less action-driven type movies, I can end up with a 2-hour 1080p movie around 9-10GB or 720p around 5-7GB. And, the quality is excellent if using CRF18 setting in BluRip.

I set up an unRAID server to supplement my WHS storage. I only do full BD ISO rips so my 26TB of content takes up 52TB of space on my WHS. I'm leaving around 4TB of unused space on my WHS in case I need to remove a drive and now I'm only using my unRAID to add new content. I still have 15TB of space left in my unRAID so it should last awhile since it isn't used up as quickly as the space on a WHS.

 

[lsarver]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Brajesh /forum/post/20886317


Yes and no. I have over 1,200 movies, so can't afford to do 1:1 rips for all that are BD sourced. Storage is cheaper than it used to be, but as I use WHS and it uses folder duplication, everything takes up twice as much space. Add TV shows and music collection, it starts to really add up. So, by re-encoding some that are less action-driven type movies, I can end up with a 2-hour 1080p movie around 9-10GB or 720p around 5-7GB. And, the quality is excellent if using CRF18 setting in BluRip.

That's not a media or storage problem. It's a server problem. Reconfigure or replace WHS. Aaron's suggestion of unRAID is a good one.

 

[olyteddy]

Crop if you want but I assure you the black bars don't eat a lot of your bitrate, so you won't see a significant reduction in filesize or increase in picture quality if you do crop.