To black bar or not too?

[Vaughn]

After finally completing a few DVD backups I realized the Industry Standard seems to be keeping the original aspect ratio that when played on most TV's results in black bars, at least the DVDs I have. My question is when creating a backup can you elimanate all the black bars with cropping? I use a flask MPEG type program.

Also what is the choice of most professional ripper/converters here? Do you prefer to keep the original aspect ratio and just live with the black bars or do most insist on acheiving a full screen but squishy appearance?

[khp]

I prefer to chop off the black bars and encode at a resolution that matches the proper aspect ratio. This is possible with any proper encoding tool, including flask.

Although I guess some would argue that flask is not a proper encoding tool.

[Batman]

Some people who encoded full screen vhs videos to divx or mpeg, add black borders (to create the impression you're watching a dvd ) On most movies I can't notice the difference.

[UncasMS]

crop, resize, keep aspect ratio

and stay away from flask

[Enchanter]

If you are planning to watch the encoded video on your PC, it is always a good idea to remove the black bars. Firstly, the black bars, in a way, take away some of your assigned bitrate for the video. Secondly, removing black bars does make the video look "cleaner" (eg. Oh look! No black bars! ^_^).

The idea is basically, if you have a 4:3 video, you chop off the black bars and resize the video, keeping the original AR. If you have a 16:9 video, you chop off the black bars as well (much more of it to crop though) and resize the video keeping the 16:9 AR. The same goes for videos with any other ARs.