One reason/thing to consider: When removing bars, your image height gets reduced and will not be e.g. For TV/HDTV releases it can sometimes make sense to keep it, cause you can also see logos/ads etc. Letterboxing has been important for playback reasons but nowadays every simple TV is capable of displaying it correctly, same with reading simple srt subtitles.Įven YouTube does not always force the video into a specific aspect ratio (anymore).įor BluRay releases, I do not really understand why it isn't the standard to reduce it.

If their quality drops, people will start avoiding their releases. Scene groups just have their (different) set rules of how to encode stuff. I figure I'm doing the math wrong, or misunderstanding how the filters are supposed to operate, or something simple, but my understanding of ffmpeg video filters is basically nothing.I don't think so.

In 1:1 pixels it measures 720px across, not 640. However, the resulting display of the fullscreen video is pillarboxed, yet slightly horizontally stretched. The pixel dimensions are 720x480, the display dimensions are 853x480, and the two MKVs can be successfully merged (after reencoding the widescreen.mkv to the same video codec, but without video filters). I've tried a number of filters to accomplish this, and the closest I was able to get was a slightly wider than expected video, otherwise pillarboxed properly. So I would like to pillarbox the 4:3 video as I encode it, and then hopefully append it to the 16:9 video.

What I would like to do is ultimately combine them (mkvmerge widescreen.mkv + fullscreen.mkv) and to do that I need matching display aspect ratios.

I have two MKVs, pulled from DVD, that are respectively 16:9 and 4:3. I'm confusing myself over how the video filters work, particularly how they work together, I think.

Ffmpeg scale letterbox