Can I crop/change video aspect ratio while repacking?

Help
1

Hi All,

I’ve got an mkv where the video has a 16:9 aspect ratio which is not correct. It appears with black stripes above and below the “real video”.

I looked it up and the correct video aspect ratio should be 2.35:1, so is there an option somewhere that would allow me to take this mkv, and generate a new one, with the video cropped to its correct aspect ratio? This would also decrease the size which is a free bonus :smiley:

Thanks a lot,

2

Welcome!

There are options for setting both the display dimensions (which can be used to set the aspect ratio) & the cropping. That being said, in both cases only header fields are set, no modification is done to the encoded video, and it’s up to the player to honor both types of header fields. Support for cropping is somewhat spotty whereas display dimensions are generally supported.

3

Thanks for the reply!

I guess if I really wanted to do that cropping, I would need some video editor tool… Do You recommend anyone? I’m far from expert, but always eager to learn :slight_smile:

Regards,

4

Handbrake is usually my go-to tool for video encoding; an excellent piece of Open Source software. It’s not a full-blown video editor, but just for the sake of cropping it definitely suffices.