We were already running FFmpeg in the queue to scale/pad/resize videos with great success, and I know it was able to crop videos as well, so the hard part became detecting these videos because not every video has these green bars and needs to be cropped.

I immediately turned to our video encoding queue as a potential place to solve this issue, as all of our videos are processed through the queue, which means that any fix implemented in the queue would catch any legacy videos that had not been migrated to the new systems yet as they were migrated to the new systems, and they would be automatically fixed without any human intervention.

Given that users were getting access to this content next week, this issue very quickly became the highest priority ticket for our team, and I was assigned to work on it. This was discovered by our content QA process post-migration, when they reported that all of the videos were playing back with neon green bars on the top and the bottom. It came to a head recently when we began migrating this legacy content to our new media players and content authoring systems, which do not and will never support these types of letterboxed videos. Oh boy have we regretted that video production decision over the years. The gray represents the gray area, the red box represents where our video player would zoom in to When played, our video players would 'zoom' in on the center of the video to hide the green bars.

At my place of work we have some old videos that were filmed in a 24:9 aspect ratio and then letterboxed using bright green bars to be 16:9 for consistency with the rest of our videos.

Ffmpeg crop filter