For context I am doing this because of EmuVR. It’s a VR application that allows you to play retro games in an early 2000s bedroom on big CRT TVs. You can also use a VCR to watch movies. The problem I’m running into is a lot of movies/TV shows have been updated to be 16:9 which causes a lot of letterboxing on the 4:3 TVs.
I have tried searching around various torrent and DDL sites with minimal luck. Most of them seem to struggle with recognizing “4:3” as a search term. Adding the term “aspect ratio” seems to help but doesn’t narrow it down completely and only provides a few results.
I am aware of a few individuals like threesixtyp on The Pirate Bay who put out bundles of TV shows and movies in the original aspect ratio but I’m wondering does anyone else had suggestions on how or where I could find this kind of thing? Maybe a site has an advance search section for aspect ratios for example.
I figured some kind of specialty or niche torrent site may have something. I could see something like a best retro movie pack popping up on 4chan’s torrent board.
I am aware I could crop the videos with a program like Handbrake but that would take a decent amount of time to do.
It might be easier to reach out to EmuVR and see if they can update it to crop the videos instead of letterboxing them during playback. I would think someone working on such a project would be receptive of this idea. This also wouldn’t be terribly difficult from a programming perspective.
I think that may not be on them. I think it would be a matter of tweaking the FFmpeg core in RetroArch but I don’t know if it has live video cropping as a feature especially when within the confines of RetroArch. Scaling? Maybe but that’s not really what I’m after.
Searching online I am getting either command line options or unrelated results about CRT gaming.
But it would ruin the framing. Not all shots are framed with the subject dead center.