Crop video with Handbrake
HandBrake by default will try and detect and crop black bars from the video. Encoding black bars increases the encode time and the amount of disk space required, so it's best to let HandBrake remove them.
However, HandBrake's auto-crop is not perfect. It's giving you a best guess at what the crop values should be. If you find it gets it wrong, which is not that common, you can adjust them by selecting the "Custom" option.
You can preview the effect of your adjustments by clicking the "Preview" button on the toolbar. The preview window will then appear and will display in real-time any changes you make on the picture settings screen. If the size of the output exceeds the window size, the preview window will scale it to fit to screen.
Sometimes, you can also crop video black bars with Handbrake's crop controls if you're willing to lose some of the video. When you insert a typical widescreen DVD into your Mac, launch HandBrake, and then click the Picture Settings button you'll discover that HandBrake automatically crops the top and bottom portion of the movie by 58 and 62 pixels respectively to cut out the black bars. The Width and Height settings should come in at around 720 by 304 with the Keep Aspect Ration option enabled.
If you enable the Custom option in the Crop portion of the window and increase any of the crop settings (top, bottom, right, left), you'll find that the Size figures change. If I crop 10 pixels from either side, for instance, the size of the frame changes to 704x304. I've just dropped a mess of pixels, which could conceivably allow me to fit the movie on my iPod, but I've also lost the left and right edges of the picture.
Best Handbrake alternative to crop DVD
For those people who happen to own some commercial DVD disc, you will find that Handbrake is useless since it lacks the ability to bypass copy protection from DVD disc. Then you will need to find a more powerful DVD Ripper application to complete the work. Here, we highly recommend Pavtube ByteCopy to you. The program has full importing support for DVD disc, Video_TS folder and also DVD IFO/ISO image file. Apart from bypassing the DVD copy protection including including Region code, RCE, key2Audio, UOP, CSS, Macrovision, FluxDVD, Protect, ARccOS, AACS, BD+, ROM Mark, BD-Live, etc, the program also assists you to rip or convert DVD to any of popular digital file formats or hot devices preset profile formats.
Related article: Best Handbrake Settings for iPad | Encode H.265 with Handbrake 1.0.0 | Rip Protected DVD with Handbrake on Mac
As for the crop function, you can use this tool to remove the black edges around the DVD video frame, or change output video aspect ratio as including 16:10, 16:9, 5:4, 4:3, 3:2, and 2:1 to make it adapt with the devices which you plan to enjoy DVD movies with.
For Mac users, please switch to download Pavtube ByteCopy for Mac to complete the conversion on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, etc.
