obby

Hello all,
After trying a number of converters, the one to use is the Video Converter supplied with the M6 player.
However, when converting 16/9 widescreen source, there are black bands above and under the picture.
With a converter like Iriverter, you can set the option "pan and scan" to get rid of these black bands.
As the Video Converter software is using Mencoder as coding engine, there should be an option to set this.
When you click the settings button in the main window, you get an advance settings window.
On the last line of this is a editable box with "additional settings".
Does anyone know the command to add for getting pan and scan to work?

member

Well, in mencoder, to crop you can add this option

-vf-add crop=x,y

where x and y are the new resolutions (centered in the screen). So if you had black bands of 80 pixels on top and bottom, on a 720x576 pixel screen (kinda standard for 16:9 cinema screens encoded in widescreen), then you would add:

-vf-add crop=720x416

EDIT: this should read -vf-add crop=720:416. END EDIT.

See the Wikepedia entry for the Miniplayer for a good typical command-line that will also maintain the image proportions, and take care of the multiples-of-16 requirement for video resolutions.

obby

Thanks for the info MEMBER

Your command works only if I type
-vf-add crop=720:416 in place of -vf-add crop=720x416

However your method has a disenvantage: each source resolution must be examined to set the correct crop value.
I found however a better method on this forum (search mencoder)

Just add -vf scale=427:240,expand=:240:::1,crop=320:240,rotate= 1

and nearly all 16/9 videos are recalculated to use the whole screen.

member

Oof! Right! I always make that mistake (using "x" instead of ":") when encoding videos too . I still haven't learned it seems.

I think I used that form of command line that you found at one point, but it was sometimes stretching videos (not maintaining aspect ratio)... perhaps I just remember wrong though! Does it do that? I'll try it again next time.