Removing black borders around movies

Black borders around movies and movie clips is a huge problem on the internet. Black borders is a result of video editing and bad handling of resolutions and aspect ratios, such as 16:9 and 4:3.

Removing black borders can be done with a video editor, such as FFmpeg, which is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

In our example, the size of each black border is guessed and the borders are removed from our input example of 720×576 pixels and resized to 320×288 pixels by FFmpeg.

ffmpeg -i example-input.mpg -croptop 76 -cropright 96 -cropbottom 76 -cropleft 96 -s 360x288 example-output.mpg

Do you need help with video editing? Contact Open Tech SmbA by mail at opentech@opentech.dk or call Open Tech SmbA at +45 43 62 22 88.