AutoCropper

Overview

Use the AutoCropper plugin to auto detect and remove black bars without cropping subtitles.

Introduction

Many TV broadcasts are still in 4:3 aspect ratio, and quite frequently wide screen movies are broadcast letter boxed, meaning that 50+% of each video frame is taken up by black bars. If this is viewed on a 16:9 (wide screen) display in MediaPortal's 'Normal' zoom mode, you will see additional black bars right and left of the video, even though the actual video content fits (or nearly fits) your display.

Zoom mode solves this issue if you are lucky, but if subtitles are shown in the black bars, they will be cropped. The AutoCropper plugin attempts to solve this by auto-detecting the black bars and removing as much of them as possible without cropping subtitles. Future features might include actually moving the subtitles into the video area. 

How to use it

The AutoCropper is implemented as a process plug-in in MediaPortal. Thus it does not have a user interface.  You need to enable and configure it in Configuration > Plugins > AutoCropper. 

AutoCropper can operate in 3 modes: 

• Off : Do nothing (also disables previous crops)
• Manual: Crop upon user request - i.e. you press a key to crop (see below) and it stays that way
• Auto: It crops automatically, by polling with a specific interval. This mode is experimental and (currently) very resource demanding.

In order to be able to switch between modes you need to assign a keyboard or map a remote button to ACTION_AUTOCROP_TOGGLE. To request a crop in Manual mode, assign a key to ACTION_AUTOCROP.

Related Extensions

Intelligent Frame Correction (IFC)