Handbrake Cropping issue - Blu Ray safe?

[iOrbit]

So today i was ripping a DVD. (95% of my collection is Blu-Ray) and i notice one of the contents on the dvd was cropped a little. i can tell because the intro of the content is identical to other episodes. but 1 of the 7 episodes was being cropped! i was mystified as to why. eventually i figured out how to stop handbrake cropping it. - Picture settings.. cropping - automatic or custom.

Now i'm worried.

after putting together a collection exceeding a 100, does this mean many of my blu ray rips may have been cropped without my knowledge? my settings are usually apple tv 3rd gen preset, with the picture settings as; Anarmophic Strict, cropping: Auto.

does handbrake not encode an exact pixel for pixel replica? i thought it did - i thought it only removed the black bars. but in this 4:3 episode it cropped off more than the black bar and overrall made it slightly more zoomed in (i checked the other episodes, none had any as significant cropping, but were a tad zoomed in/cropped.

is this a problem that is only for DVDs? or does handbrake potentially crop/zoom on blu-ray encodes too??

please reply

 

[dynaflash]

does handbrake not encode an exact pixel for pixel replica? i thought it did - i thought it only removed the black bars. but in this 4:3 episode it cropped off more than the black bar and overrall made it slightly more zoomed in (i checked the other episodes, none had any as significant cropping, but were a tad zoomed in/cropped.

is this a problem that is only for DVDs? or does handbrake potentially crop/zoom on blu-ray encodes too??

All of the presets and the hb default is to use autocrop. autocrop uses samples from the previews it generates on initial source scan to detect the black bars to crop out. HB's auto crop is considered very accurate but nothing is fool proof. One thing (which I do) is set the scan images in preferences from the default 10 to to 60 (though its pretty overkill). This gives HB a larger sample size for your source to determine the amount of autocropping.

Note that sources that change aspect ratio are the most common to fool HBs autocrop. For instance maybe a documentary where the main parts are shot in 16:9 interspersed with old original 4:3 footage. Something like that can throw autocrop off.