I haven't been able to find something that does this... Could anyone with widget skills make it? It would be quite useful.
I generally re-encode my movies "pre-cropped." Since I always view my video zoomed in (to take up the whole screen), the area that is cropped is wasted data. I can get better quality at the same bitrate by cropping the part that isn't displayed in iPod touch during the encoding process.
I use VisualHub. Here's what I do:
I take the starting resolution of the video. For example, my HD copy of a movie is 1280 x 528. I realize, by looking at the shape of the video, that pixels need to be shaved off the horizontal dimension. So I create a proportion like this:
480
---- ----
320 528
I do your standard cross multiply and divide, and get this:
480 792
---- -----
320 528
So, I take 1280 and subtract 792, giving me 488 pixels to crop. I divide that by two--244--and I plug that number into VisualHub: Crop 244 pixels off the left and 244 off the right.
I then plug 480 x 320 into VisualHub as the final resolution. Since 792 x 528 is proportional to 480 x 320, the scale down doesn't create any oddities (stretching or black bars).
What I want is a widget where all I have to do is plug in the starting resolution (1280 x 528 in this example), and it will spit out the amount to crop, and from which dimension (vertical or horizontal). It seems that it'd be fairly easy to implement, for someone with the know-how, and I think many people would find it useful.
I generally re-encode my movies "pre-cropped." Since I always view my video zoomed in (to take up the whole screen), the area that is cropped is wasted data. I can get better quality at the same bitrate by cropping the part that isn't displayed in iPod touch during the encoding process.
I use VisualHub. Here's what I do:
I take the starting resolution of the video. For example, my HD copy of a movie is 1280 x 528. I realize, by looking at the shape of the video, that pixels need to be shaved off the horizontal dimension. So I create a proportion like this:
480
---- ----
320 528
I do your standard cross multiply and divide, and get this:
480 792
---- -----
320 528
So, I take 1280 and subtract 792, giving me 488 pixels to crop. I divide that by two--244--and I plug that number into VisualHub: Crop 244 pixels off the left and 244 off the right.
I then plug 480 x 320 into VisualHub as the final resolution. Since 792 x 528 is proportional to 480 x 320, the scale down doesn't create any oddities (stretching or black bars).
What I want is a widget where all I have to do is plug in the starting resolution (1280 x 528 in this example), and it will spit out the amount to crop, and from which dimension (vertical or horizontal). It seems that it'd be fairly easy to implement, for someone with the know-how, and I think many people would find it useful.
