Handbrake: Crop settings (custom) are not reset when loading a new video into HandBrake

[bohning]

Problem description:

I use HandBrake to crop black bars from videos. I use the automatic cropping feature, but then switch to manual mode to verify and potentially finetune the crop settings. After I have cropped a first video and then load a second video into HandBrake (via drag & drop), the manual crop settings and video dimensions are not reset, cropping the second video arbitrarily. I then select automatic crop again, then go back to manual cropping again. But then the video dimensions are not adjusted accordingly. In order to avoid a video resize, I have to manually increase width and height to the available maximum. Maybe it’s a feature, but to me it feels more like a bug.

Another, possibly easier explanation: when in manual crop mode, increasing the crop decreases the width/height respectively, but when decreasing the crop again, the width/height do not get increased. So let’s say I have a video of width 100 pixels, I crop width by 10 pixels on each side, width gets adjusted to 80 automatically. Then I decide that a crop of 8 pixels on each side is sufficient, width should be 84, but it stays at 80 pixels and I manually have to increase it to 84 (I hit the up arrow many times until it reaches the maximum or alternatively add a 0 to the current width, in my case 80 -> 800, which is automatically corrected to 84).

I’m not sure if this explanation is very clear, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thanks for this awesome tool!

HandBrake version (e.g., 1.3.0):

HandBrake Version 1.3.1 (2020010400)

Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 19.10, macOS 10.15 Catalina, Windows 10 1909):

macOS Catalina 10.15.4

Error message text and/or screenshot:

Please provide any error messages or screenshots that may help.

HandBrake Activity Log:

I don’t think an activity log is required for this. Otherwise, I will attach it upon request.

[sr55]

Maybe it’s a feature, but to me it feels more like a bug.

It's all up for debate really. It's not technically wrong and will suit some use cases better than others.

That said, the Windows UI for example aggressively honours the preset . So user modifications are discarded on the picture settings tab when loading a new source forcing the need to create a preset to have a consistent crop. Different behaviour, some users will like this, some won't. It would however solve the problem from having to manually reset for this particular use case.

@bradleysepos @galad87 thoughts?

[bradleysepos]

WinGUI behavior of honoring the preset seems most consistent with what we preach.

[galad87]

I'll add a preference to choose the behaviour.

[bohning]

@sr55 I see where you’re coming from and that it’s a feature for some use cases while not for others. I would be happy if the width/height get increased automatically if the crop is reduced, irrelevant of loading a second video. This way, I would load a video, set automatic cropping, switch to manual cropping, finetune cropping dimensions and can skip the step of manually maximizing width/height if they are adjusted automatically to fit the crop (not losing any pixels).

Thanks a lot in advance for considering my issue/request!