How to auto-crop image?

[mbahr]

I've been using SageTV for just a short time. It's very feature rich!

One feature I have not been able to find is the ability to set what I would call a cropping area to remove extraneous parts of the image from being played back.

For instance: I've been recording reruns of seinfeld from my local hidef station (via hdhomerun). It is a SD recording rebroadcast on HD and the top few lines of the image has a bunch of dancing noise which I *think* is the closed caption data. Regardless, I would like to adjust the image so that portion of the broadcast signal is not shown when I play back.

Any suggestions?

Thanks much!

-Mike

[GKusnick]

Setup > Detailed Setup > Multimedia > Aspect Ratio Settings. You can adjust the horizontal and vertical scaling separately for each of the four Aspect Ratio Modes.

[mbahr]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Is there a way to do this w/out scaling? I'm worried that would turn circles to ellipses...

-Mike

[ke6guj]

You should be able to adjust it just a couple percentage points larger to move the line off screen. The picture would be stretched a little bit, but not so much that you would notice it. And if you adjust both horizontal and vertical the same percentage, it would stay undistorted. Or else, use the offset settings to move the screen up a couple lines to move the line offscreen.

[mbahr]

I've adjusted it. But, this seems to adjust it for ALL ratios and resolutions, not just the SD ones.

Normally, my SD content is centered in the middle of the screen, and has large black areas on the around all sides of it. The HD content is centered vertically, but goes to the left and right edges.

I adjusted the sage settings for 135%h and 136%v and tweaked the image up the screen to move the offensive portion off the top. Seinfeld looks great now! However, the HD Ken Burns documentary now extends way beyond the edges of the screen, so I'm missing lots of the content.


I see I can adjust the aspect ratios separately (using the 'circle' to gauge good or bad) and I'm wondering if I can compensate somehow with that? Or, better yet, is there a more direct way to adjust SD scaling separately from HD scaling?

Thanks so much for your advice!

-Mike

[ke6guj]

What you can do is set your "Display Aspect Ratio Setting" so that it fits your screen correctly.

Then, you have 4 aspect ratio modes that can be set independently. Set one so that HD content displays correctly and set another for SD content.

What I do is on my widescreen TV is watch HD content and standard SD content in Source mode. Source mode set at 102%h/102%v. 16x9 HD content appears to fill the entire screen, and my 4:3 SD content fills the screen vertically with pillarboxing on the sides. that way there is no distortion of the video.

Then, for 16:9 content broadcast in 4:3, that is 16:9 content that is letterboxed with top and bottom bars, if I watched it in Source, I would have letterbox and pillarbox bars. Basically bars all the way around the content, sometimes called postage stamping. For that, I have 4:3 Aspect Ratio set to zoom in 133% H and V. That way, I zoom the content out to completely fill the screen with no distortion.

I use nielm's auto-aspect ratio changer to automate ratio switching my different shows as much as possible.