Can I get rid of widescreen bars on a TV show?

[JonPinkerton]

Hey guys! New to the program and the forums but I think I will be here quite a bit now!

I have a current issue with a TV show I am trying to Rip. The show's aspect ratio even on the DVD is close to the ratio of an average monitor. But it was made as if it were widescreen (See link). http://imgur.com/p5J2f6w

I was wondering if there was a setting within the advanced settings to cut off the widescreen black bars to make it fit the screen better. I know there will be loss in resolution but I would prefer it over the current situation. (This is how it shows even on the DVD copy / it looked like this even before converting to MKV)

I am very new to this whole thing so if anyone could direct me to a beginner's tutorial that could help me with some questions that I am assuming are pretty common.
- How to get the best quality / what profiles can I use that are better
- How can I fix the horizontal line stitching effect that I get on some videos?
- What does buying the full program get me?

Currently I am on the defaults of all settings. any guidance towards my issue or towards better quality rips is much appreciated.

[Woodstock]

Letterboxing is inserted into the video to make it fit the fixed frame size of the media, 720x480 on DVD, 1920x1080 on Bluray. There are tools you can use after ripping (I use handbrake, available at handbrake.fr) to remove the bars... But, the display device will put them back, if the resulting screen aspect ratio doesn't match the display device.

With handbrake, you can crop the video to make the aspect ratio fit your display device, which will then mean video will "lose the bars", but you also will lose some qualityin the process.

[JonPinkerton]

Great! I already have handbrake installed, it was my first attempt at converting my DVD's to usable video files but I read that it cant decrypt files properly for use on Windows for some reason. This is why I came here and had good success with my first rip.

But I will be trying your suggestion tomorrow. I just learned about interlacing and I am in the process of deinterlacing many of my shows that have that issue. I am a stickler on having the best quality available for any show that I really enjoy. So I've been buying many of my favorite shows on DVD and I appreciate all the help I can get on making them as crisp looking as possible!

[Woodstock]

Decryption was never the purpose of handbrake, which is why it isn't built in. It does have libraries for reading the file structures of DVD and BD ISO files that have already had the encryption removed, and those libraries can use other (not supplied) libraries for the decryption. But, even then, it does not give usable error reporting when there are problems with the disk. Hence the recommendation to use a specialized tool.

Of course, support for handbrake is done over on forum.handbrake.fr (you probably know that already).

[Q-the-STORM]

you could also simply use MPC-HC and madVR as renderer... madVR has a autocrop feature which crops on playback... it will not remove black bars permanently (if you play it on other players they are still there), but you don't have to reencode the files.... any file will work, including all files you get from makemkv....