BYTETOOLS

Remove Black Bars From Video

Detect and crop the letterbox or pillarbox bars around a video automatically. Samples the footage, finds the real picture area and re-encodes without the bars.

Drop a letterboxed video here or click to browseDetected and cropped on your own device — nothing is uploaded.
24

Pixels darker than this value count as part of a black bar. 24 suits most files; raise it for washed-out greyish bars, lower it if real picture content is being cut off.

What is the Remove Black Bars From Video?

The ByteTools Remove Black Bars From Video tool gets rid of the letterbox stripes above and below a picture, or the pillarbox bars at the sides.

  • Two-pass detection: samples many frames and takes the most common result
  • Shows the detected rectangle, the offset and how many frames agreed
  • Sensitivity slider for faint, greyish or washed-out bars
  • Start point control so a dark opening shot cannot skew the result
  • Tells you plainly when there were no bars to remove
  • 100% local processing — your video is never uploaded

How to use the Remove Black Bars From Video

  1. 1

    Drop a letterboxed video onto the box or click to browse for one.

  2. 2

    Set how many seconds to sample and where in the clip sampling should start.

  3. 3

    Adjust the bar detection sensitivity if the default misses faint or greyish bars.

  4. 4

    Click Remove black bars and let the detection and cropping passes run.

  5. 5

    Check the detected picture size and agreement figure, then download the MP4.

About the Remove Black Bars From Video

The ByteTools Remove Black Bars From Video tool gets rid of the letterbox stripes above and below a picture, or the pillarbox bars at the sides. It does not guess: it decodes a sample of your footage, has ffmpeg's cropdetect filter report the picture area frame by frame, and takes the rectangle that the most frames agree on.

That two-pass approach matters, because a fade-in or a dark opening shot can fool a single-frame check into cropping away half the image. You can set where the sample starts and how long it runs, and a sensitivity slider controls how dark a pixel has to be before it counts as part of a bar. The detected rectangle and the percentage of frames that agreed are both shown.

Everything runs 100% locally in your browser through a WebAssembly build of ffmpeg. Your video is never uploaded. The cropping pass re-encodes the picture with H.264 on your own hardware, so a long or high-resolution file will take a while — the detection pass itself is fast because nothing is encoded.

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove black bars from a video?

Drop the file in and click Remove black bars. The tool samples the footage, works out where the real picture starts and ends, and re-encodes the video cropped to that area, so the result fills the frame with no stripes.

Why does the tool sample the video instead of just checking one frame?

A single frame can be misleading — an opening fade, a night shot or a dark title card all look like giant black bars. Sampling many frames and taking the rectangle most of them agree on avoids cropping away real picture content.

What does the bar detection sensitivity slider do?

It sets how dark a pixel has to be before it counts as part of a bar. The default of 24 suits genuinely black bars; raise it if your bars are a washed-out dark grey, and lower it if the tool is cutting into the actual picture.

The tool says no black bars were found — what now?

That means cropdetect concluded the picture already fills the frame, so nothing was changed. If you can clearly see bars, raise the sensitivity slider, or move the sampling start point past a dark opening scene and run it again.

Does removing black bars change the aspect ratio?

Yes, and that is the point. Cropping away the bars leaves the video at its true aspect ratio, which is usually wider than the padded original. The result is shown to you before you download so you can check it looks right.

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