Handbrake: New option for cropping: No cropping

[olr]

The autocropping is often wrong and often wants to reduce the video size when there is no black area to erase.
But there is no simple way to ignore the wrong cropping settings. We have to select “_Custom_” and reduce the number for each border to 0.
That’s a lot of annoying actions.

So, please, add an option “_No cropping_”.

[sr55]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm combing into #2437 as we are going to be doing a wider overhaul of the dimensions tab so it will be too do that at the same time.

[yaneevt]

I second this request, and would like to add:
when choosing "No Cropping", also the image size needs to reset to the original image size.
"Same as source" is available as a Framerate (FPS) choice - would be cool to have the same here.
Thanks!

[bradleysepos]

@yaneevt I added a screenshot on the main issue to show "None" is a planned cropping option. See https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/2437#issuecomment-609008629

Please continue any and all discussion there, thanks.

[jstebbins]

I've been thinking that the act of unchecking the "Autocrop" checkbox should return all values to 0. Seems like that would solve the ask?

Of coarse, any preset that has autocrop disabled will default to all 0 when the source is loaded already.

[brownbat]

Current autocrop fails, so people want a way to avoid it completely.

But why is it failing in the first place?

The current autocrop feature takes the average of the boundaries of the screen. So if you have dark content, or multiple aspect ratios, it gets really confused.

There could be a more cautious approach to autocrop. Have it preserve any lines that ever contain content, no averaging, only remove lines that are always empty. That might keep an occasional black boundary on content with shifting edges or artifacts, but those are comparatively rarer, and easy to clean up later. (You can always trim on a second pass, but you can't restore lost content.)

How hard would this algorithm be to implement?

It is already in the code, but currently commented out.

Some people actually want literally no cropping for preservation, but a lot of others just want cropping without losing content, which this algorithm would handle well if it were enabled as an option.

If this sounds useful to you, take a look at #2219 and feel free to weigh in.

[jstebbins]

It is already in the code, but currently commented out.

Yes, there is an example of how to implement other options given the statistics that were collected about black borders. And yes it's easy to change unconditionally so it affects everyone.

But this can't be an unconditional change to crop behavior. I like the current crop behavior. It works on 99.9% of my video as desired. I never want to see black borders unless the video intentionally changes aspect ratio. I would rather overcrop a couple of pixels than have a black border that flashes in and out of existence in the periphery of my vision. A "more cautious" loose crop would very often leave a few pixel border around older film transfer content where the border often changes or moves by a small amount. I don't mind manually changing crop for the 1 in a thousand video that changes aspect.

So this would need to be made optional which requires changes to 3 UIs and the CLI to allow. I.e. an additional dropdown widget and additional cli command line options.

[brownbat]

But this can't be an unconditional change to crop behavior.

Agreed 100%, so let's make it an option.

I totally respect your experience, I don't want to break anyone's UX or normal way of working with the program.

All I'm asking is, ok, even though you haven't personally been affected, please trust me when I say my experience is different.

I've been actively testing over the last few months. For me, the current crop behavior breaks a lot. I won't exaggerate and say it's every time, but it is a clear majority, at my last count it's roughly 60% of source files, and 70-80% of DVDs or Blu Rays with some video it breaks on. It occasionally fails hard, stuff like cutting off the tops of people's faces, or just ditching a third of the screen. I will admit, I did found one old DVD where the current crop behavior performs much better, "I, Claudius," which has pretty random screen edges. I'm struggling to find any others, but ok, even finding that one I think is argument enough to keep the current autocrop behavior at least as an option. (That and your testimonial that the current behavior is your ideal. I don't fully understand it based on the sources I'm seeing, but I trust you have looked at it deeply, so 100% for keeping that as default.)

"No crop" is a half-step, but really just leaves me back where I started, manually fiddling with cropping values on most videos.

I put in a PR trying to take the very first minimal step at implementing this as an option, not as the default, but I know it has a long way to go and I might need some pointers on how to integrate it into the UI. I did that because I wasn't sure how else to get the devs to come to a firm decision on whether this approach would be acceptable or not.

Please help me out here if you can. I will bounty this if that's the best approach. It's driving me crazy and burning a ton of my time, and I still don't know enough about the UI to fully patch it in. (Trying to learn though.)