Black bars on encodings

[ToonGal]

System: 400mhz, 576MB, Voodoo 3 3000, PVR-250, Sage v1.4

On all my recordings, there are 'black bars' framing the tv data. In general, there are 2 pixel deep bars on the bottom, 6 pixels on the left, and 9 on the right. For recordings I want to keep, I've just scaled them out with TMPGEnc, but I was wondering if there were settings that could be changed.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[stanger89]

Well, since nobody else has tried to tackle this:

I think those bars are actually part of the broadcast, most TVs have a lot of overscan so usually you don't notice it. I've seen this to and I think thats why the AR settings are defaulted to ~105%, to crop black parts on playback. I don't know of any way to avoid recording them now, I think that would have to be implimented in the 250.

[gplasky]

And you do have fill as the Aspect Ratio mode and not source. This would be in the multimedia setting. You can also modify the aspect ratio settings.

Gerry

[justme]

I see others from the beta thread went looking for her posts as well.

I don't know of any way to avoid recording them now, I think that would have to be implimented in the 250.

We really wouldn't want the PVR250 to remove them in it's hardware(if that's what you mean) since this would make it harder to ever support CC on Sage or any software that uses it. Having said that the answers above should work for you. Sage tries to automatically work well with the default settings, but with so many different configs(individual's hardware) out there... there is almost always some fine tuning. As the previous posts suggest try playing with the apsect ratio settings.

[ToonGal]

Thanks for all the answers gang!

Here's my SageTV Multimedia tab settings:
- Video Capture Settings (Advanced)
- Aspect Ratio Mode - Fill
- Horizontal Zoom Percent - 107
- Vertical Zoom Percent - 107

@stanger89 (not stranger, as everyone else misspells):
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by AR~=105%. The zoom % you mean? I'm guessing that's why playback of the MPEG-2 files on Sage looks cleaner than on Media Player (for instance). I'm assuming the 105%/107% numbers means SageTV itself is "editing out" the black bars simply by blowing up the picture in the replay. Vewwwwy cwwwever... Never occurred to me.

@gplasky:
Fill, most definately. Modify aspect ratio settings? Meaning the fixed ones in the Multimedia dialog box? Or some registry values at the Hauppague level?

@justme:
Thanks again in this thread too, hun.

One thing SageTV lacks is documentation for the technical user base it has. If I do jump on board, I can see me becoming Narflex's worst nightmare given the number of 'how does this work' posts for documentation. At least they'll be balanced by the 'good idea for feature' and 'man is this cool' posts...

[justme]

Just to be clear... do you see these black bars in Sage playback? If so yes you want to modify the AR zoom control's settings. You'll have to excuse me it's been so long in using 1.4 I can't say exactly where. Exept their under Detailed Setup, which tab I don't know. Just increase the zoom.

If you want to try and have Sage/PVR card remove(in realtime) these bar from the Mpeg as it's captured... this has been discussed before but I don't think anyone came up with a way to manipulate the PVR's capture hardware. Anyway it would be bad for compatibilty. The generally accepted solution is to strip(many tools depends on desired format) them when you archive the file.

[ToonGal]

@justme:
No black bars in Sage. I'm guessing that the H/V Zoom of 107% makes it just big enough so that the 'x' pixels L/R/Bottom don't show up. Haven't found a control for "AR zoom", but am betting it is the H/V one I listed above.

And yes, I strip the bars in a two step/program process:
1) Womble MPEG Video Wizard 2003 - true frame editing, helping me remove the commercials / extras without having to reencode. 3 minutes on this old dog for a 0:26:42 episode.
2) TMPGEnc Plus - has the cropping feature to convert MPEG-2 to MPEG-1 while removing the 3 bars.

All's good, and Between the Lions is becoming my friends' favorite kids show in the US/UK thanks to me/Sage/Hauppauge.

[justme]

Wombles(I use Mpeg2VCR) and TMPGEnc Plus are great things. Doing anything with Mpeg2 would be a disaster without these two tools. Glad to hear things are working out. Yell, if you need any help. I'll respond if I think I can add anything usefull. Great work on the EPG colors in 1.4 UI BTW.