is there a way to crop an mpg file without converting it to avi. I can crop with virtual dub but it has to be saved as avi and the avi ends up being huge. example - a 6mb mpeg turns out to be like 200mb avi.

yes and no, mpeg2/mpeg1 needs the blackboarders to maintain aspect ratio on a tv, if you remove the borders it gets stretched and mutated, another reason why it really shouldn't be used imo.

Anyway, if you remove borders on one side, you tend to need to add borders onto other sides to get it to keep its aspect ratio, on standalones anyway.

You can however crop with TMPGenc on one of its encoding steps.

I'm curious though as you didn't mention many details; if it is already encoded as an mpg, merely cropping won't make it any better, infact it makes it worse, its only when you need to re-encode the movie and compress it (ie DVD to avi), you waste bits encoding black borders when you don't need to (solid colour = very wastful for mpeg codecs).



Your doing it wrong then I would assume. MPEG4 is superior to MPEG2/MPEG1, it is a better quality at a smaller filesize, always. Your wasting bits, if its already 6mb, there's no point keeping the bitrate really high and everything, the damage, as it were has already been done.

A 6mb mpg should be ~3mb mpeg4, if your working with low bitrates, nero digital is ideal for this.

so on virtualdub i was just using full processing mode cuz direct stream copy wouldnt work. What should I do then? Bring the bitrate down in vdub and how do I do that. btw thanks for the help. the file is mpeg1, its acualy murder set pieces. i'd like get rid of that crappy timer, but if it means losing alot of quality then i guess its pointless as the qual isnt that great to begin with.

Personally,something that big a mess i'd leave. Cropping off just the boarders won't do anything, and cropping off the ticker is going to take too much away.

If its about annoyance with the ticker ... If you use ffdshow, you can use the delogo filter on the fly to add a blur over the ticker. I would seriously recommend that if the ticker is making it unwatchable, i think a big blur will make it just as unwatchable as will the annoyance of a big percentage of the picture missing. So its pretty much unwatchable for my tastes what ever you do.

However, its what 800mb? if u use gknot it will make everything simplar, but you can gt that down to a 600mb without any substantial loss in quality, you can't increase the resolution though, if you take it above its native its likely going to make it go all pixelated. I don't have a bitrate calculator on me as i usually use the source + gknot, but yes, keep the resolution the same size horizontally, crop down the boarders and aim for 600mb/lower bitrate.

Have you used vdub before? if so then its normal way to alter the bitrate, in your codec setting second pass, the option is there... if you haven't done it before then your only doing a single pass by the sounds, you'll notice the bitrate option on the second pass setup.

you need to setup a first pass -> save the project (tick the defer box), then switch the codec to the second pass, enter the new bitrate or target filesize, then save the project (tick the defer box). Then you go to the job control and click start.

However i wouldn't recommend doing it at all and wait for a retail or DVDscr given how poor the quality is, if you want to watch it I would recommend ffdshow filtering over actually re-encoding it, and if you want to re-encode it, use gknot... it will make everything a lot easier.

My 2 cents anyway.

whoa, thats alot of info. maybe i'll try a few of those methods, ffdshow for sure. thanks for all the help spud. appreciate it