Question about MCEBUDDY SOFTWARE colorize black and white video files

General Support / Questions Hardware Encoding
2

Hello Trish,

Thank you for your feature requests and feedback! I can certainly address your questions about MCEBuddy.

Colorizing Black and White Video Files

That is a very interesting idea! We can definitely look into this if more folks would like it.

Remove Black Bars Feature Feedback

Thank you for reporting your issue with the Remove Black Bars feature, especially with video files like TikTok or those shot on a phone in a vertical or small-square format.

The feature is designed to detect and remove traditional black bars typically found on the top and bottom of wide-screen movies (letterboxing) or the sides of older 4:3 content (pillarboxing).

When dealing with videos that are:

  1. Vertical (portrait) aspect ratio (like most phone videos/TikToks), or
  2. Small square video with a large amount of empty black space around the actual content

The algorithm might struggle to correctly identify the black bars without cropping into the actual content, especially if the internal content is also surrounded by a small frame or if the black area is not perfectly uniform.

To help the MCEBuddy developers investigate and potentially improve this:

  1. Check your aspect ratio settings: When MCEBuddy removes black bars, it typically tries to stretch/crop the video to a standard aspect ratio like 16:9. If your phone video is 9:16 (vertical), forcing it to 16:9 will either result in severe cropping or black bars on the sides.
  2. Provide a sample: The best way to get this fixed is to upload a short sample of one of these problem videos so the developers can test their cropping algorithm against it. They cannot fix what they cannot reproduce.

For now, if MCEBuddy’s automated feature fails on these non-standard videos, you may need to use a dedicated video editor to manually crop the frames before or after processing with MCEBuddy.

I hope this clarifies things!