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When I used that it gave me a huge output for the dimensions. Something like 2000x400. Not a good thing.
Im not sure how to use the -X option, but I'm sure that's what I'm looking for. A guide I was following told me to look into that option. So far I'm able to come up with nothing by myself.
It's really hard to come up with a helpful answer, because you didn't even write what you want to achieve! So all I can say is: RTFM!
Your first command adds black borders on all sides (-Y with negative values). -X does not help with borders at all. If you want to cut borders from the source, you can use the 'detectclipping' filter. It will have a look at your source material and tell you exactly which values to use for -j / -Y.
I'd have to agree. It's fine to say that the original size of the avi is thus-and-so, but without saying what you're trying to convert the original into-- a VCD? an SVCD? a DVD? changing encoding from Xvid to DivX (maybe your DVD player accepts the latter but not the former)? the same video encoding, but a different audio encoding (your DVD player can't play the *.ogg audio track)? NTSC to PAL? PAL to NTSC?-- there's no real way we can judge the command you're sending, or why it's failing to do what you expect.
You might want to look into avidemux or dvd:rip, both pretty good front-ends to transcode-- but it really helps much more to read man transcode first, as the frontends don't hold your hand very much if you don't know what you're dealing with in the first place.
Any or all of them will help to give you a fair grounding in what transcode is about, what you might need to do with it, and how to get started-- but you'll still need to apply a fair amount of mental "elbow grease" at first to get good results.
It gave me the two outputs like normal. There was no borders on the left and right side which is bearable. Though how would you make it completely borderless?
I'm pretty sure those files aren't DVD complient so should I put the "-J filter=detectclipping" into my original command?
Sorry again guys, thanks for the help. I'll look at those guides later, I'd rather just use CLI though if I have to I'll go GUI.
The detectclipping filter doesn't actually modify your video. It just analyzes the frames and prints out the detected border sizes to stdout. THEN you have to specify these values for -j / -Y options. It will make your movie completely borderless as long as the border space really is not used never during the whole movie (not in the intro, not during the movie, not in the ending credits).
Sometimes (especially in bad encodes) there will be noise in the movie even on the borders, causing the detection to fail. In that case the best way to go is to make a screenshot and count the pixels, for example by using the ruler in gimp or another graphics application, and then use these values to cut the image. Or just experiment with the values until it fits.
Or just use transcode's built-in filters to clip and resize to the correct dimensions for PAL or NTSC DVD (--export_prof dvd-pal or --export_prof dvd-ntsc, --export_fps 25 or 29.97 depending on whether you are transcoding to PAL or NTSC). This would at least start you with a pair of compliant audio/video streams that you could then tweak so that the encoding met your preferences.
You don't even have to complete the transcode operation to see if it's "OK"-- you can tell transcode to only encode a specified amount of time of the source video using the -c option (then merge the audio and video to confirm proper a/v sync in the final product), or you can just watch the .m2v file in mPlayer (specifically mPlayer; Xine doesn't seem to like to do this, but mPlayer will) while transcoding does its work. If it doesn't look right visually, you can then just Ctrl-C the transcoding, delete the incomplete audio and video files, adjust your settings and try again.
The thing is, I don't think you can get borderless conversion from transcode. Which is not the same as saying that the final product cannot be displayed on your television without borders, because it often can. However, this is not the job of transcode, but partially of dvdauthor, and partially of your DVD player. All transcode is going to do is provide a compliant video and audio stream, and if your image is not natively 720x480, 704x480, 352x480, and 352x240 (for NTSC), or 720x576, 704x576, 352x576, and 352x288 (for PAL) transcode has no choice but to put borders around that image to bring it to the proper aspect ratio for the standard. Do things any other way (stretching, zooming and the like), and you're risking losing part of the image, or worse, the dreaded "stretched heads" syndrome, which you really want to avoid (as it's quite irritating).
Furthermore, the image you see as produced by transcode is not completely 'final'. The video will be acted upon again by mplex (to multiplex the audio and video back together), but this does not usually change the video visibly. However, converting the resulting *.mpg file to *.vob files to be burned onto a DVD can, and so does actually playing the resulting DVD --the data on the DVD may be converted, stretched or zoomed by the DVD player for purposes of display, and that's before you choose "Zoom Fit" or "Wide Screen" or whatever display option your DVD player may have. I've certainly converted videos to DVDs that looked different (in terms of things like borders) between 1) playing the *.mpeg in mPlayer, 2) playing the DVD folder as a device in mPlayer, and 3) playing the DVD in my DVD player. What I mean is that it can be that a condition that looks like it might degrade the video on your computer (unreasonably huge borders in a letterboxed film, for example) does not display at all on the television-- because in this case, the DVD player has "reformatted" the display so it displays as a normal letterbox and not the weird thing you were looking at before you burned the *.vob files.
So to some extent, you may be using the wrong tool for the job (transcode doesn't so much do this), and to some extent, you may be attempting to solve a problem that is not in fact a problem (your DVD player may solve it for you).
If you really want to zoom the image so that borders are not needed in the first place, I think you might want to check out mencoder's cropping and scaling functions (or crop and scale using avidemux without changing the encoding) before worrying about transcoding to another encoding format. See 7.10.3. Cropping and Scaling in the mPlayer docs.
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