Customizing cropping of black bars

[douglascerny]

I absolutely love this app. I searched for a long time on how to convert my100+ 3D blu-rays to vision pro, and this has been the magic sauce.

I have a couple troublesome videos with the black bars. A good example is Oz: The Great and Powerful. The first part of the movie is a square aspect ratio, and then when he arrives in Oz, it expands to the whole letterbox. Unfortunately the whole movie has top and bottom black bars. Without the "Crop black bars" feature checked, I get the top and bottom bars in the final video. But if i check it, It crops also the horizontal width based on the first part of the movie (pre-Oz). I didn't see anything in the GUI or the terminal calls to customize the video dimensions for special cases like this. Is there a way to do this? Or if not, which phase does the crop occur, and maybe i can manually perform that and start at the following phase?

[cbusillo]

Are you on reddit? I have a small chat with a group of experienced users. The crop function is set to the ten minute mark, I think. I never envisioned a situation like you mentioned. I can't think of a way around that, but maybe one of the guys there will have an idea.

Unfortunately I am not actively working on this project right now. A simple change like that requires me to rebuild the dev and build environment which was quite a pain!

[Jimmbo]

Without knowing the details of your work flow, it’s possible that a chatbot could handle rebuilds like this. I’m just throwing the possibility out there. As users compile a wish list, AI might eliminate the pain.

[douglascerny]

I'm not on reddit, but can join. Is there a link or something to send to join the chat?

[cbusillo]

From my experience, you would spend about the same time trying to use AI. It would likely be able to do the edits, but the build environment is a pain. Trying to make a macOS app from Python was harder than I expected and a few of the libraries have changed since I made it, so there would be a bit of a new learning curve. I went the macOS app route to make it easier for people to get going. In addition to this, testing revisions is painful since it needs to do a full encode. Too many times small changes I made had a ripple effect that broke the encoding chain!

I'm sure there are better ways to build it, but this is what I found worked at the time. Including getting the Apple blessing so users don't get the "Throw this program away" type prompt.

[Jimmbo]

I can relate. Ideally, there’d be other devs working on this, to do the legwork of shifting to a more expedient platform, if not painfully iterate on this one as issues arise. But the circle of people even wanting this app’s functionality isn’t large enough to float in such help.

When I found myself in this exact position once, the circle was actually huge and we still couldn’t get much real dev help beyond “consulting” (everyone’s a consultant)!

the work you’ve done so far has been appreciated!

[cbusillo]

It's just me. Honestly if I could simplify the dev and build environment I would try to make some small changes. Oh and have someone create a testing 3DBD. That was something I asked people for but didn't get a response on. I needed a 3DBD with specific things so that testing would be quicker and hit all the pain points. Using multiple full discs to test just takes too long. Especially when you find you have a small typo in the name of a channel config.

I'm just glad I contributed a small tool that makes a few people happy.

[cbusillo]

@douglascerny if you create an account, just give me your username so I can invite you. It's a private invite group. I don't do well in larger groups.

[douglascerny]

dougC_from_MSP (i think that's the username)

[cbusillo]

@douglascerny its not showing up yet. Start a chat with me. I'm cbusillo there as well.