Letterbox and Windowbox Removal

Since I have the WDTV, I have not yet purchased a Blu-Ray player, although the time is drawing close when I will be getting one, now that blank Blu-Ray discs can be purchased for around $1 per disc in quantity.  However, in the meantime, I have been converting my DVD discs to high quality mkv format so that I can enjoy them on the WDTV from flash media, or an external hard drive.  Most of the DVD movies that I own are in anamorphic widescreen, and convert for playback on my HDTV without issue.  I finally ran into one when converting an older movie that turned out to be not widescreen, but a letterboxed movie!  I was not impressed that the publisher would choose to release the movie in this substandard format, but there is little I could do, except try to figure out how to remove the windowbox that now framed the movie.

I am sorry to report that I spent many hours searching for some way to remove these bars, with little success.  Oh, I ran across instructions, but all of them were multi-step processes that had me downloading all kinds of weird, wonderful and wild software solutions. 

Finally, I thought to just take a look at the tools I already have on my computer, and see if one of them will do the trick. 

As it turns out, Handbrake does a superlative job removing the unwanted letterbox, and I didn't even need to do anything!  It automatically detected the extra bars on the film, and as I had set it for widescreen output, set the cut ratios automatically to remove them.  What a difference!  Now I can enjoy the movie properly displayed on my screen.


Location: Windsor, ON, Canada

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