Analog video stretching (Crunchie)

robertbl22 · **16th November 2005, 05:58 PM**

Hello,

Crunchie (or one of its dependant apps) is stretching video from my analog source. The original dvr-ms video is 720 x 480 with a black margin on the left side. After the video is crunched, the black margin is gone and the video is stretched horizontally to fill the 720 wide. I'd rather keep the black margin and not stretch the video. Is there a configuration in crunchie.ini where I can turn this feature off?

Arkay thanks alot for a badly needed app. If you have the time, could you list/explain the Crunchie.ini settings for DEINT, MPLAYER, PASS1 and PASS2. Or at least references of where to get more info.

Thanks,
-Robert

arkay · **16th November 2005, 08:26 PM**

Hi Robert,

Hehe. That's 2 posts in as many minutes with similar problems... Doh..

Analog sources.. I'm tempted to say the best way to solve this issues is get a digital card!

Unfortunately at present there is no way to turn off the automatic crop detection.

Have you tried the various zoom options in MCE to see if it can be displayed correctly?

One other thing you can do but it will only work for recordings that are like this is to change the output resolution to one that suits. You'd have to work out how much black is being trimmed from the sides though.

I've had a number of requests to disable the crop detection for this reason but I've never really wanted to do it. It's pretty heavily embeded into the code and will take a while to "remove".

Actually, now that I think about it it shouldn't really happen at all. Assuming what you are recording is a 4:3 image (even with bars at the sides) it should crop properly and encode to a 4:3 image.

Can you post the contents of your log file for me to look at. Also take a look at the properties of the original DVR-MS and tell me what the resolution was. I've got a sneaking suspicion that it's going to be a 576*480 video (or some bizarre res like that). If it is (and I think this is common with analog in some countries), then I can probably rectify the probem in the crop detection routines so it works well for everyone concerned (rather than removing it).

The crop routine makes some assumption about video format based on the horizontal width of the image. It could just be that it's getting it wrong and encoding it as 16:9 where it should have been 4:3.

Have you tried it with the force4:3 option enabled?

Cheers,
Arkay.