Cropping an MKV file

[deblock]

I know this is your board and I don't want to piss you off, however I'm confused, are you saying MKV lossless cropping is supported or is not supported? If you say 2 opinions completely opposite of each other 1 right after another, it would be good to clarify which opinion you're going with and it would be good to acknowledge that perhaps you were mistaken and spoke a little too soon.

MKV is a container (like AVI, M2TS etc.) and, unless it contains a lossless encoded video, it's impossible to crop it losslessly - read: if it has an h264 video, it's not possible to crop without re-encoding it...

I may be wrong, but try this: take whatever video, in letterbox format, lossy encoded (h264, mpeg2, vc1 etc) and put it in an MKV container; crop out the black borders; compare the same frame before and after; if the cropping is effectively lossless, you will note no difference in the cropped and uncropped frame (apart, obviously, the absence of black bars); let me know if it does occur.

[spoRv]

As I wrote before, I may be wrong, but you must let me know if I'm wrong (or right) telling me if the cropped and uncropped MKV of the same frame are perfectly the same... if they are, you are right, if not, I'm right... that's it!

[Satanika]

I can't see that the mkvmerge crop settings does anything for h264 streams.
There's a program called h264info that lets you edit various things in a raw 264 stream - cropping does technically work, however it seems to mess up the video or possibly the stream needs to have been encoded in a special way to allow the cropping to work.

[deblock]

Have you tried MPEG-2 steams?

Also, I didn't know of h264info, thanks. Hopefully it comes in useful when I need to change pulldown and/or cropping (if that actually works)

I can't see that the mkvmerge crop settings does anything for h264 streams.
There's a program called h264info that lets you edit various things in a raw 264 stream - cropping does technically work, however it seems to mess up the video or possibly the stream needs to have been encoded in a special way to allow the cropping to work.