Cropping And Resolution Settinga

[Ipod guru]

First of all, thanks so much to "Sketch" for answering my previous questions.

However, i do have a couple more which anyone is welcome to comment on:

I have many widescreen dvds which i am hoping to convert and, like many others, i can't stand those retarded black bars at the top and bottom of your playback screen. These bars are particularly explicit and annoying in the context of ipod playback concidering the screen is barely bigger than a domino. I want them gone!!! Is there any way of removing them? -

Cropping? - Doesnt this work off the same principle as what your ipod does in the settings menu when u disable the "widescreen" function (Hence a zooming effect to the 4:3 ratio till the black bars dissapear and therefore losing the sides of your picture) if so then i dont want to do that.

Changing the resolution? Doesn't this just change the screen dimensions, i.e skewing or stretching the image? Wouldn't it better be titled skewing or stretching instead of "resolution" in reference to height and the width? If not then why is it called resolution? I thought resolution was more to do with how many pixels for a given square area.
On the topic of this menu, what do the "mod 16" and "total pixels" items refer to?

It appears to me that unless you want to manually resize the height and width hence stretching or narrowing your picture there is no other way to sensibly remove the black bars? Is this correct keeping in mind that I DONT WANT TO CROP IF IT MEANS LOSING THE SIDES OF THE PICTURE WHILST SIMULTANEOUSLY LOSING THE TOP AND BOTTOM BLACK BARS.

Sorry for the essay length.

[Sketch]

Cropping? - Doesnt this work off the same principle as what your ipod does in the settings menu when u disable the "widescreen" function (Hence a zooming effect to the 4:3 ratio till the black bars dissapear and therefore losing the sides of your picture) if so then i dont want to do that.
The difference is that you can set the number of pixels to crop on each individual side. It is possible (if not common) to remove the black bars from the top and bottom without touching the sides. I do this with every widescreen source I convert because black bars are a waste of disc space.

On a side note, I didn't realize disabling the iPod widescreen setting did a Pan'n'Scan on the fly. I assumed it just stretched the picture. Shows you how often I don't use it. ;)

Changing the resolution? Doesn't this just change the screen dimensions, i.e skewing or stretching the image? Wouldn't it better be titled skewing or stretching instead of "resolution" in reference to height and the width? If not then why is it called resolution? I thought resolution was more to do with how many pixels for a given square area.
That's a good way to define screen resolution. As a result of that, though, a convention has been developed to define resolution as pixel-count/dimensions regardless of context. Technically, the convention is frowned upon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution#Pixel_resolution), but it's the way things have gone. One can argue the semantics of it, but it's a clear, concise way to distinguish image size from file size. Also, videos for iPod conversion are rarely stretched (enlarged) or skewed (changing the aspect ratio without cropping).

On the topic of this menu, what do the "mod 16" and "total pixels" items refer to?
The MPEG-4 and H.264 codecs compress video in 16x16 macroblocks. If either your height or width isn't a multiple of 16, your video will have partial blocks and lose some considerable effiency. "Mod 16" should ensure each axis is a mulptle of 16. I'm guessing the "total pixels" allows AutoResize do go beyond a width of 640 or height of 480 as long as the image size doesn't exceed 307200 (640x480) pixels. This is useful if you only use TV-Out and never watch video on the iPod itself since both NTSC and PAL have 720 width.

It appears to me that unless you want to manually resize the height and width hence stretching or narrowing your picture there is no other way to sensibly remove the black bars? Is this correct keeping in mind that I DONT WANT TO CROP IF IT MEANS LOSING THE SIDES OF THE PICTURE WHILST SIMULTANEOUSLY LOSING THE TOP AND BOTTOM BLACK BARS.
Not really. In most cases for widescreen, there are black bars in the input source. Resizing the source keeps the bars, and the scaling is uniform across the entire image. If you want to get rid of black bars, you must crop top and bottom. If you enable the widescreen option on the iPod, though, the iPod will put black bars even though they aren't in the source.

The problem here is that if you crop a 2.35:1 source and resize to a 4:3 ratio, the image will be severly distorted. Everything is going to look tall and skinny. If that bothers you less than black bars on the iPod screen, then this is ultimately your answer. Otherwise, you have to crop sides. It's the lesser of two perceived evils.

[Midiman]

The bars frequently aren't really there. In other words, you can't crop them off... you would have to crop existing picture information off the sides to cut the aspect ratio down to 4:3. They are just displayed as the absence of picture information. Turning widescreen OFF in the iPod's video settings should almost perform the equivilent of converting to full screen... but you WILL be missing picture information on the side edges.