Video aspect-ratio conversion software

[jimbouk]

Hi

I've got myself a widescreen camcorder and have some footage that's 16:9. I was wondering if anyone knows of and (free?) software to either add black bars or chop the ends of to get me 4:3 video. Preferably lossless as I've got things as avi's.

Cheers

[haloman]

Some version of VirtualDub will probably do what you're after, and it's free and open source.

[jimbouk]

Cheers, I'll take a look and see if I can get my head round it

[arthurleung]

If you want to change your video you'll lose (a lot) of quality.

Easiest and painless way of doing it is to set your decoder to crop while playing, depends on how bad is the source, you could lose up to another 50% quality in order to keep the same size if you would like to encode in 4:3.

As long as you don't change the video frame, you could change the aspect ratio flag in the file and have no change in size and quality but that will just stretch the image rather than cropping

[Lourdes]

You'll want VirtualDubMod or VirtualDub-MPEG2 rather than the original version. All you need to do is open it and change filters under video processing.

[jimbouk]

Well I've got it opening in VitualDub (VirtualDubMod wouldn't open the avi's). The filters work and I can change aspect ratio, but in black bars, crop to aspect ratio etc.

The problem now is that it's not detecting the input files as widescreen. I think pal widecreen uses non-square pixels, which aren't being picked up on so it's just reading it as the resolution and assuming square pixels.

I'll keep playing and see what I can do, but if anyone knows a workaround that'd be great.