Remove black bars from a video

Why videos have black bars

Black bars appear when a video's picture doesn't match the frame it was saved in. A widescreen film inside a 16:9 frame gets bars at the top and bottom, called letterboxing. A vertical phone clip placed in a wide frame gets bars on the sides, called pillarboxing. Screen recordings and old TV captures often have a thin black border too. The bars waste space and look odd when the clip is posted on a site that adds its own frame.

How to remove black bars from a video

Drop the video above and press Detect and crop. FFmpeg's cropdetect filter, running in your browser, samples the whole video and records the area that holds the picture. The tool picks the crop that appears most often, so a dark scene or a fade to black doesn't confuse it. If the detected area is smaller than the frame, it re-encodes the video to an MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio at the new size. If there are no bars, it tells you and makes no file.

Results and limits

The crop is the same for the whole clip, so videos whose bars change size partway through, such as films that switch aspect ratio for some scenes, are cropped to the most common shape. Very dark videos can be over-cropped. Check the result and use Crop video with exact numbers if the automatic crop cuts into the picture. Re-encoding takes time on long videos, so try a short clip first.

Your file stays on this device

Convertur reads the file in this browser tab and builds the result there. The file is never sent to a server. Larger browser engines load only when this tool needs them.

Before you start

Input: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, and AVI. Output: auto-cropped video. The settings appear before anything runs, so you can check them first. Your original file is never changed.

Video work uses a lot of memory and CPU. Try a short clip first and check that the sound and playback work. On a phone, split large batches into smaller ones.

Keep the original until you have opened and checked the result. The work happens in this browser tab, so the size you can handle depends on your device's memory, your browser and the file itself.

Steps to remove black bars from a video

1. Drop a letterboxed or pillarboxed video into the box above.
2. Press Detect and crop and wait for the analysis and encode.
3. Check the detected crop shown with the result.
4. Download the cropped MP4.