Video Window Cropping and PC-VCR program

[Barbas]

Hi there!

My user guide for PC-VCR Remote says that I can crop out the ragged border around my videos.
That's true, but the problem is that is doesn't seem to crop the video that is captured. Is this cropping merely a way to hide the distortion during playback, and has nothing to do with cutting it out of the actually data?

thanks!

Barbas

[fluggo99]

That's a good chance. The MJPEG codec that all the Matrox cards use only works with very specific sizes of video, namely 704x480, 352x480, 352x240, etc. in North America and Japan. Cropping the edges would reduce the size to, say, 640x450 -- a size that your card will refuse to work with in MJPEG. So yes, PC-VCR just tries to hide the edges -- it can't really crop them out of captured video (using MJPEG, that is...)

[Elurew]

wait, so do the matrox cards copy anything at the 4:3 ratio? 640x480 or 320x240 or smaller??
aren't those the standard screen resolutions?

[fluggo99]

They can capture in a lot of different resolutions (including 640x480 and 320x240) using RGB capturing. The files produced this way aren't compressed in any way, so they have the potential to go beyond your system's capabilities for moving data and to take up an incredible amount of space on your hard drive, so we usually trade them for slightly-lower-quality-but-much-easier-to-manage MJPEG files.

I don't think PC-VCR will crop these files on capture either, but using other programs, you can crop them to whatever size you want (and usually encode them to Cinepak or Indeo to save space) without difficulty.

As for the 4:3 aspect ratio, there's been many, many discussions about it on this forum, but I like to think of it this way:

Matrox cards stretch the picture from the standard 4:3 to 4.4:3, thus gaining higher resolution in the horizontal part of the picture. When played on your monitor, it will appear as 4.4:3, but the difference is very slight. When played back to a TV, the picture is restored to 4:3.

A recent discussion on this topic is right <a href="http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002628.html">here</a>.