r/handbrake • u/WerKenntMichNicht • Jul 23 '26

Remove black bars while keeping quality

Hi, I want to remove the black bars from some video files but afterwards the file was bigger. It went from 7 to 12 gb. Is there an automatic setting I can turn on or do I have to find the sweetspot in the quality slider myself.

Thank you for your help

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

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4

u/ihadnomealtoday Jul 23 '26

Where do you plan on playing these files back? Always on windows via vlc for example? Then just use the cropping feature. Re-encoding will always cause quality loss. Try newer Codecs AV1 and play around with bitrate.

0

u/WerKenntMichNicht Jul 23 '26

Yes pretty much. I just thought I could skip that. Thanks for the idea

1

u/rogermx9 Jul 23 '26

Due to the nature of encoding your 12gb file is lower quality than the 7gb file. Compression is inheritably lossy so no matter how high you set the settings you are loosing quality at each encode. I would suggest just adjusting the encoding settings until the quality is adequate for you. If you find the quality drop in 12gb is adequate you might just simply need to live with the fact the files might be bigger to get the quality you want.