Can't get autocrop to select the entire black bars

You don’t need the quotes

Create a custom profile and in the ffmpeg-video section add your custom crop settings.
Then also set the SkipCropping=true directive in the profile (this causes MCEBuddy not to use its own crop detection and rely on the custom crop settings you specified in the profile. See this topic for more details on it: MCEBuddy - Advanced Settings, Commands and Tweaking