Actually, looking at all the stuff videobox does, I think it's better to port the no-frills videocrop element and use that. Videobox does all kinds of extra stuff which is much harder to implement and right for so many formats (like on-the-fly conversion to AYUV and adding coloured borders etc.)

 2006-09-02  Tim-Philipp Müller  <tim at centricular dot net>

        * configure.ac:
        * gst/videocrop/Makefile.am:
        * gst/videocrop/gstvideocrop.c: (gst_video_crop_base_init),
        (gst_video_crop_class_init), (gst_video_crop_init),
        (gst_video_crop_get_image_details_from_caps),
        (gst_video_crop_get_unit_size), (gst_video_crop_transform_packed),
        (gst_video_crop_transform_planar), (gst_video_crop_transform),
        (gst_video_crop_transform_dimension),
        (gst_video_crop_transform_dimension_value),
        (gst_video_crop_transform_caps), (gst_video_crop_set_caps),
        (gst_video_crop_set_property), (gst_video_crop_get_property),
        (plugin_init):
          Port/rewrite videocrop from scratch for GStreamer-0.10, and make
          it support all formats videoscale supports (#345653).