Removing Letterboxing

[TheBodo]

Howdy gang
Every mkv that I make ends up with black bars at the top and sides when played in PLEX(nvidia shield). The mkv file when played with VLC is letterboxed but if I use the web interface for PLEX on PC, it's full screen. Is there a setting in MKV that I'm missing or is this working as intended?

Any advice would be appreciaated. Thanks!

[Woodstock]

Moved to processing and playback because MakeMKV cannot do anything about the video source.

Letterboxing is filler for when the aspect ratio of the video doesn't fit the format of the disk. There are other things that come in to play, like anamorphic pixel sizes.

Handbrake is one tool that will strip letterboxing by default. But, if your viewing window doesn't match the aspect ratio of the video, your player (or monitor) will re-insert letterbox bars to fit the video.

[TheBodo]

Ugh, OK! So I need to run them through handbrake. Any advice for settings? They are just dvd rips so I'm limited to 480i.

I appreciate the help.

[Woodstock]

Presets with "480" in their name are tuned for DVDs. They have deinterlace turned on, and work pretty well.

The nice part is, since you have the files as MKVs, you can run a lot of tests without much work. Encode just a chapter or two with one preset, do the same chapter(s) with a different one, and compare. You can also use different encoder "speed" tunes.

[TheBodo]

Cool.

I'm playing with the presets now. What does Size: 720x480, 851x480 display mean?

Source is 720x480 (853x480). Sorry that these are probably fairly basic questions.

[Woodstock]

When dealing with anamorphic content, pixels aren't "square". You store 720x480 pixels, but the playback software "stretches" them horizontally to fit the display, in your case to 853 pixels on the monitor.

If you check the handbrake logs, you're see "PAR" or "Pixel Aspect Ratio" values.

I believe the handbrake documentation goes in to this.