I can get away with it if I use VLC but standalone media players can't handle it ! Unfortunately MediaInfo utility does not reveal the application used to rip the file. Now if I use the crop function in VLC I have to crop 87 pixels from top and bottom making real resolution like 720x402.
How to crop a video in quicktime full#
Under normal full screen playing condition I have black and not so black bars all around. The tools -> Codec Information under VLC gives the resolution as 720x576. Just to give you a bad example of ripping. Even if you could "remove" them without re-encoding as you describe, it probably wouldn't reduce the file size much at all. One question which comes to mind though, is why do you actually want to crop the black bars if you're not going to re-encode? Unless the edges of the video aren't nice and sharp (which they mostly are on Bluray) I'm not sure I quite see the point. You can add crop values to MKV files by running MKVMergeGUI and opening the header editor from the file menu, then use it to open an MKV. I haven't played with cropping that way in quite a while. I "think" VLC handled the top and bottom crop values okay. Last time I tried it, I think MPC-HC made a mess of the aspect ratio if you added cropping to the side, while it ignored top and bottom crop values.
In practice though, it's not very well supported by software players and completely unsupported by hardware players (as far as I know). In theory, you can mux video with black bars into an MKV, set a crop value, and the player will crop that amount on playback. MKV has a crop flag as part of it's specification.