crop feature in mkv container not recognized?

My TV recordings sometimes come in letterboxed 4:3 format (yay, tv companies) on windows I can easily use mkvmerge to crop the black bars on top and bottom when I then play back the resulting mkv file with vlc it is perfectly cropped, the same file played back in xbmc is still letterboxed is that a problem on my end or does the xbmc player just not recognize the crop parameter in the mkv container?

I tried to do some searching but either I didn't come up with the right keywords or there is nothing here that touches the subject so far.

See attachment:

original file:


muxed to mkv with the cropfilter enabled:


mkvmerge crop filter: