Cropping/resizing DivX

[JaKa]

Hi all,

I looked through discussions but didn't find exact answers: I have several DivX clips at non-standard resolution 720x???. To output them via DVDMax, I'm thinking of resizing or cropping them. However the quality will drop because the movie has to be decoded and then encoded again. I tried resizing and it made outlines softer and increased "blockyness". (I think)

Is there a way to crop 16 pixels off one side of the screen (or 8+8 left/right) without de/encoding so I would have 704x??? movies? I'm using VirtualDub which decodes the movie to RGB even just to crop off the sides. Is it even possible? (I'm thinking of just slicing one macroblock column away, for those who are familiar with MPEG compression family...)

If this can't be done, can anyone give tips about how to do resizing with minimum quality loss? I'd like to burn my movies to CDRs, but don't want to do it with inferior quality or in non-standard sizes.

[dZeus]

Just throw away all movies encoded at 720 or ither non-standard resolutions.... then just encode all the movies at 640xXXX yourself

that's what I will do in the next couple of months

[JaKa]

dZeus,

that would be ok, if I had coded them myself...I know that resolutions over 700 are an overkill for most tv's, 640xXXX is okay and takes up less CPU juice. Thanks for tip!

The point here was converting already existing DivX's, though. I'm sure that other people with G400 have the same prob, at least judging from available DivX resolutions...

And, yes, my Cel500 isn't quite up to displaying the movies full-screen and then using Clone Desktop...maybe when I'll get a P3. And somehow the TV screen seems fuzzier when I use Clone instead of DVDMax, but that might be just me.