[MPlayer-users] Nobody here who can help with cutting black borders away?

[Nico Sabbi]

Rainer Hantsch wrote:

>Hi, Nico Sabbi!
>
>On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Nico Sabbi wrote:
>| if no one answered there will be a reason, right?
>
>Very interesting point of view. :-/
>I dont' see it this way, but let me explain below...
>
>| to crop you need to use -vf crop=...    read the man page for details;
>| in any case  you can't crop without re-encoding, so I suggest to store
>| the original recording as a lossless format, such as ffv1 or huffyuv
>| (again,  man  mplayer, man ffmpeg, ffmpeg -formats to get the list of
>| codecs)
>
>Thanks for the information. In fact, I shall repeat doing what I did 1 day
>long: Trying to understand a man page which is not really to understand...
>You are joking, right?  :)
>
>
>About man-page and documentation:
>---------------------------------
>man-page:
>   I only see a long listing of options in the man page, going over 33 pages
>   A4 and not very clear to read and/or understand. Also, the man page is a
>   total mixture between mplayer and mencoder. 
>

most of the code is shared, and what is program specific is specified at 
the end.
In my opinion mplayer/mencoder man page is the best one I ever read of 
all the
playing/transcoding programs around

>Because this two products use
>   only a part of options (each), this is causing a lot of confusion.
>   The man page is possibly useful when you _know_ what you want to do and
>   you only need a final -very litte- info (syntax) to get it work, but
>   this is definitely no _documentation_, it's nothing else than a listing
>   of optins with a very brief explanation.
>   So the man page is everything, but NOT USEFUL for learning how to use
>   mencoder/mplayer.
>
>  
>

if you need an  encoding  guide you can find plenty at www.doom9.org and 
www.digitaldigest.com
(among the others);
generally a man page is supposed to explain how to use the program 
(after all it's a manual page, not a guide)
and mplayer's one is not an exception

>HTML-Doc:
>   In addition, there is a HTML "manual" available in several languages,
>   which slightly scratches the surface of some trivial ways of using
>   mencoder. This part goes over 3 pages A4 and shows primarily a very
>   trivial way of converting a DVD into a divx in 2 pass, and how to
>   (theoretically) repair a damaged avi and how to paste two AVI-files
>   (and which actually does not really work).
>   Because of the extreme number of options I am sure that 30 pages will
>   not be sufficient for mencoder!
>   I would possibly reduce to one language (english) and invest more time
>   into completing and updating this manual to make it a real USER GUIDE,
>   which also shows with many examples how to use mplayer/mencoder for
>   multiple purposes.
>  
>

it would be a good initiative

>Conclusion:
>So I must currently say, that there is currently nothing available which is
>worth to be named DOCUMENTATION or USER GUIDE and will be really helping a
>newcomer to LEARN using mencoder. 
>
as I wrote above you seem to want a general encoding guide, with 
specific hooks to mplayer

>And exactly this leads into my situation
>(and I am sure that I am not the only one!) that I can choose between doing a
>stupid "trial and error" (calculate by yourself how many possible combinations
>until - hopefully soon - an acceptable result is found), or asking in the
>mplayer newsgroup.
>
>
>  
>

believe it or not but experimenting yourself  teaches more than a 
pre-made recipe

>mfg
>
>  Ing. Rainer Hantsch
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>  
>
btw, what you need is something like this, which you have to adapt to 
your needs:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ffv1 -oac pcm -o orig.avi tv://  
(followed  by the  tv options)

then

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts 
vpass=1:vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:autoaspect -oac mp3lame 
-lameopts cbr:br=128
-vf crop=<coordinates> -o film.avi orig.avi
mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts 
vpass=2:vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:mbd=2:autoaspect -oac mp3lame 
-lameopts cbr:br=128
-vf crop=<coordinates> -o film.avi orig.avi