I have a video file that's a 4:3 representation of a 16:9 picture; that is, the top and bottom black bars are "hard-coded" into the video stream.

I've tried cropping it with FFmpeg, but the result is always either unchanged or remains 4:3 with the 16:9 picture vertically stretched.

Can anyone give me a little help in taming the cropping functionality of command-line mode FFmpeg to get this thing adequately cropped?

Thanks.

Got it.

New question: Is there any way to losslessly crop a video file without the need to reencode? FFmpeg does a very good job of making a reencoded file look pretty, but I can still tell it was lossily recompressed.

Using "-vcodec copy" results in no cropping being done. Using "-sameq" results in equal quality but a gigantic filesize.

Help?