_,,,^..^,,,_ said:
The HDTV cropping shifts wildly from scene to scene, so it's not possible to do a crop-it-all; it should be cropped scene by scene...
Which HDTV cap are you using? The one on Usenet is rock-solid; that is, there's no shifting cropping like you mention here. It's 100% 16:9 (Super35 open matte) besides ~8 pixels on the left and right.