How to add black bars to video

This should be relatively easy since I’m under the impression that most people here are technical geniuses, but I have no clue how to do this.

Let’s take Adywan’s ESB:R, for example. It’s 1280x544 (2.35:1), and that’s not as good as it can be to me for 2 reasons:

• I want to burn it into a Blu-Ray disc.
• Subtitles overlap with the video and sometimes are hard to read.

So how do I add black bars to the top and bottom WITHOUT losing quality but still making the video a 1280x720 16:9?

You have to re-encode, so some information will be lost. The best you can do is give it as good of an encoding as you can (high bit rate, 2 pass, etc).

Or, you could wait for Adywan to release his blu-ray version, whenever that might be.