Resend my activation email : Register : Log in 
BCF: Bike Chat Forums


Ripping settings

Reply to topic
Bike Chat Forums Index -> The Geek Zone
View previous topic : View next topic  
Author Message

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 15:40 - 11 Feb 2012    Post subject: Ripping settings Reply with quote

Anyone any advice about getting the best quality DVD/BD rip for the smallest file size? I can't seem to get a good balance between filesize and picture quality. I can get a less than a gig but the quality's lacking (in my eyes anyway, the wife can't tell the difference, but then again she can't tell when something's in HD or appreciate Blu Ray) but a good quality 720p rip is always above 6gb.

I only need a max of 720p as it's mainly for a 10.1" netbook that we're gonna use for films when we're flying abroad (and streaming Netflix through to a bigger telly 'cos it's got HDMI out).

As ever, any advice and guidance is more than welcome. I'm using Aieesoft Blu-ray Ripper.
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

whitedevil
World Chat Champion



Joined: 28 Nov 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 17:56 - 11 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

What codecs are you working with?

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC will offer much smaller file sizes while maintaining excellent visual quality.

Unless you have a good sound system AAC audio codec will also offer good quality while keeping file size small.
____________________
GPZ500 sold ~ CBR600FS-2 sold ~ ZX6R sold ~ Street Triple R
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 19:07 - 11 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

Cheers. I set it up to rip at the iPad setting, 720p H.264 mp4 and got Green Zone BD down to 2gb. Just trying the same thing with Gladiator DVD now.
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

Seb
World Chat Champion



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Karma :

PostPosted: 00:34 - 12 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

Be sure to try some ripped footage on the netbook before you go nuts, the majority of netbooks (Pretty much those without Ion/Vision GPUs) wilt up and die at the mention of high bit rate HD footage.
____________________
2010 Triumph 1050 Sprint ST
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 20:43 - 13 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tried both ripped footage at 720p and streamed footage at 1080p too. Coped with both admirably. The 1080p looks INCREDIBLE. Even down to 300ish it's still looking good, but you can tell there's a drop off in sharpness. What's really cool is the wireless streaming from the PC/NAS, via the netbook HDMI out into the big telly. Mind blowingly good.
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

Neorion
World Chat Champion



Joined: 08 Jul 2008
Karma :

PostPosted: 10:16 - 14 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

What NAS are you using?
____________________
VFR FI 2000- Shiney Red Thing
"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 19:41 - 15 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's just a terabyte WD external hooked up to the router. I'm gonna invest in a specific NAS at some point. And a wireless media player.
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

tahrey
World Chat Champion



Joined: 07 Jul 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 19:40 - 16 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

I can't bring myself to care too much about compressing DVDs these days ... a 2Tb drive will hold upwards of 300 of the things, raw (in other words, if it cost £100 to buy, that's 30p a disk... not worth the effort to make it 10p). I just point trusty old Smartripper at a directory on there and let it chug away.

However I do have a lot of quite nice DivX rips from donkey's years ago that clock in around the 0.7 to 1.4gb area (ie 1 to 2 CDRs), the smaller ones being 512x288 or 640x360 rez and the bigger ones being 720xwhatever. It seems a good encoder (like the regular Xvid one) and the high-end, slow-encode settings are crucial to getting that amount of crunch without tears. Also have your sound as medium-level VBR in stereo...

And be prepared for a world of pain if you're doing interlaced or telecined material without really getting geeky about it. You might have to get AviSynth involved to make that work right, and that's somewhere I wish not to take you.

Blu-Rays, can't help on, sorry.


edit:
when you say "down to 300", do you mean 300 resolution (lines, i guess?), 300 kbit/s bandwidth (pretty blinkin' low even for a DVD rip), or 300mb (ditto, but not *quite* as extreme) ?

If you're getting a watchable blu-ray at either of the latter settings, I'm impressed and want to know your software, and would like to see the results to make sure it's not just dropping the rez anyway (or blurring it) and faking you out, because then it's decidedly not hi-def any more and you may as well just use the DVD version. If it's 300 lines, that's below what a typical slightly down-converted DVD rip offers anyway...

My brother claims he's got decent BD rips at 1Gb but I haven't yet seen the fruits of this boast. I would reckon they're 720p at best and have quite a few artefacts (especially on fast motion or darkly coloured scenes) and softening unless the encoder was quite exceptional.

For reference, the 720p, not-exactly-full-motion, not-quite-FM-sound-quality material the BBC serves up as "HD" on the iPlayer runs at about 1.3Gb/hour...
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 20:53 - 17 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

tahrey wrote:
I can't bring myself to care too much about compressing DVDs these days ... a 2Tb drive will hold upwards of 300 of the things, raw (in other words, if it cost £100 to buy, that's 30p a disk... not worth the effort to make it 10p). I just point trusty old Smartripper at a directory on there and let it chug away.


You have a point, but ultra superior quality isn't needed...


tahrey wrote:
And be prepared for a world of pain if you're doing interlaced or telecined material without really getting geeky about it. You might have to get AviSynth involved to make that work right, and that's somewhere I wish not to take you.


I almost understood some of that...

tahrey wrote:
Blu-Rays, can't help on, sorry.


No worries matey!


tahrey wrote:
edit:
when you say "down to 300", do you mean 300 resolution (lines, i guess?), 300 kbit/s bandwidth (pretty blinkin' low even for a DVD rip), or 300mb (ditto, but not *quite* as extreme) ?

If you're getting a watchable blu-ray at either of the latter settings, I'm impressed and want to know your software, and would like to see the results to make sure it's not just dropping the rez anyway (or blurring it) and faking you out, because then it's decidedly not hi-def any more and you may as well just use the DVD version. If it's 300 lines, that's below what a typical slightly down-converted DVD rip offers anyway...


No, I definitely meant 300 lines res, although I've downloaded a couple of very very sharp rips around 500ish lines, that are absolutely cracking quality, but the full 1080p stuff on that 10" screen is absolutely incredible!


tahrey wrote:
My brother claims he's got decent BD rips at 1Gb but I haven't yet seen the fruits of this boast. I would reckon they're 720p at best and have quite a few artefacts (especially on fast motion or darkly coloured scenes) and softening unless the encoder was quite exceptional.


Any chance of finding out his secret?

tahrey wrote:
For reference, the 720p, not-exactly-full-motion, not-quite-FM-sound-quality material the BBC serves up as "HD" on the iPlayer runs at about 1.3Gb/hour...


VirginMedia HD is also only 720p too. The engineers reckon you're better of having your HD box set at 720- 'cos it gives a better picture than having it set at 1080p, which I can concur with...
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

LordShaftesbu...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 03 Sep 2008
Karma :

PostPosted: 21:18 - 17 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

Are you ripping Blu-rays or DVDs?
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 22:07 - 17 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

LordShaftesbury wrote:
Are you ripping Blu-rays or DVDs?


Both.
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

LordShaftesbu...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 03 Sep 2008
Karma :

PostPosted: 23:12 - 17 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

No need to rip DVDs at 720p, the highest resolution DVDs have is 576, some less.

Blu-rays on the other hand have a capacity of ~50GB, and the newer ones already use reasonably modern compression algorithms, so you're not going to be able to achieve massive increases in compression efficiency.
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

tahrey
World Chat Champion



Joined: 07 Jul 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 17:23 - 23 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

carlosthejackal wrote:
tahrey wrote:
I can't bring myself to care too much about compressing DVDs these days ... a 2Tb drive will hold upwards of 300 of the things, raw


You have a point, but ultra superior quality isn't needed...



I know, but it's just a matter of Q. Is it worth the effort? A. Not reaaaally.
Like, 5 years ago? A. Probably, if you have a lot of discs.
10 years ago? A. Definitely (...but it'll take you a while)

Like, if your time is worth £6 an hour (or 10p a minute), and you can save maybe 20p's worth of disc space per movie... if you spend more than 2 minutes extra on each one setting up the conversion, checking on it as it goes, and previewing that it looks OK at the end, it's a waste.
(and how long researching it, downloading programs, testing things out etc to find the best method? I have one, rather old, well trusted direct ripper that works on 99%+ of all discs, and would otherwise be the input source for any DivX converter...)

If you're keen on swapping films with mates using memory sticks etc, then there's maybe more of a point ... but all the same, it only costs £5 these days for an 8Gb memory stick that's big enough to hold all but the very largest, boundary-pushing dual layer movie DVD... and they're almost endlessly re-usable.

Blu-Rays... sure, there's probably some worth to it for the next 5 years or so, until affordable external discs and common memory sticks are big enough to fit a couple hundred / a single BD each Wink

Alternatively there are some flashdisk players etc that won't accept DVD VOBs, or even demand you use only their format (and it's a lot easier to convert between two AVI formats if you've already done the hard work of converting from DVD)...


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
And be prepared for a world of pain if you're doing interlaced or telecined wibble foo


I almost understood some of that...


'twas kinda the point Very Happy
Problem is you may encounter that nonsense whilst ripping movies. A very good automated converter may deal with them just fine, but will more likely smush the output and leave you wishing you'd done it manually first time out. Whereas most DVD playing software makes a surprisingly good fist of it somehow.


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
edit:
when you say "down to 300", do you mean 300 resolution (lines, i guess?), 300 kbit/s bandwidth (pretty blinkin' low even for a DVD rip), or 300mb (ditto, but not *quite* as extreme) ?


No, I definitely meant 300 lines res, although I've downloaded a couple of very very sharp rips around 500ish lines, that are absolutely cracking quality, but the full 1080p stuff on that 10" screen is absolutely incredible!


Ah, I see what's happened here then Smile
Probably what you've got is somewhere around 640x352 or x360 for full-screen 16:9 material, or 640x288~304 for more cinemascopey stuff (what still has letterboxing even on a widescreen TV). It wouldn't have been 300 to start with, and you have lost some clarity, but not enough to be generally detectable. It's somewhat like watching a widescreen disc on a conventional TV, where the DVD player automatically letterboxes it, losing some lines of definition in the process. Far less will have been lost off the horizontal resolution because of the somewhat bonkers way widescreen DVDs work (they max out at 720 pixels across), so overall it still looks alright when scaled back up. 720x342 thru 405 would be better, but that's just being fussy.

For ultimate quality you want 720x576 with a file saved with the necessary re-scaling info and a player that can understand it, or failing that a stupidly oversampled 1024x576 file (or whatever the actual number of non-letterbox lines are in the picture and a horizontal figure to match, e.g. 848x480 for an american full-screen disc, or 1024x486/848x400 for a typical cinemascope UK/US-spec one).

But really 640x360 does the job alright most of the time, and it's the default iPlayer spec too unless you flick into it's strange halfway-house "HQ" (a slightly barmy 832x468 that matches nothing else on earth) or Hi-Def.

What's this 10" screen you mention, anyway? Small displays do have a habit of flattering poor quality source material. You really don't know how shit a VHS or VideoCD (or poorly recorded DVD!) is until you blow it up. I was happily watching effectively 200p (or less) VCDs on my 14" TV when that was pretty much state of the home recording art. These days only about half of them are still playable (cheap CDRs...) but I'm not really bothered by it, as they look horrendous on anything much larger.

1080 will of course look quite good as there's not many displays of that size (except, I think, a particular Sony Vaio one?) that exceed about 720~800 lines; many of them are only 600... And if it's a TV or a portable DVD player, chances are it's actually 480 or less, which is actually worse than UK standard-def.


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
My brother claims he's got decent BD rips at 1Gb


Any chance of finding out his secret?


Let me go squeeze that rock over there and see if it bleeds...

To be honest I doubt he's ripping them himself, he's a regular P2P terrorist. Made our router regularly break down (in what I could only conceptualise as electronic floods of tears) when we were both living at home.

Still, might be worth an ask, or at least for a few sample files that could be potentially analysed. It might just be that he's less picky than I am, and that BD has somewhat more redundancy (= good times, for compression algorithms) than a DVD where almost as much visual information is already squashed into fewer pixels.


tahrey wrote:
For reference, the 720p, not-exactly-full-motion, not-quite-FM-sound-quality material the BBC serves up as "HD" on the iPlayer runs at about 1.3Gb/hour...


VirginMedia HD is also only 720p too. The engineers reckon you're better of having your HD box set at 720- 'cos it gives a better picture than having it set at 1080p, which I can concur with...[/quote]

Yeah, but they're Virgin Media engineers. A now ex-pat mate used to be line manager to a bunch of them, which basically involved trying to corral them to do any kind of work, apologise for and correct the bullshit they fed to the customers, and fix all the cock-ups they made with installations (as a result he was pretty shit-hot at the work himself, did a lovely job re-cabling our old house when we moved the rooms around). Let's just say I wouldn't trust them out of my sight if they were round my place, not that I have a hope of affording the service any time soon.

I would hope that the box is able to output 480/576i, 480/576p, 720p or 1080i (and 1080p, maybe?) depending on what the actual source material is. The thing with it is, (1280x)720p and (1920x)1080i, the two original HD standards that fit within about the same total bandwidth, are suited to different purposes. One is lower resolution, higher framerate progressive, and the other is higher resolution interlaced (= high rate interlace or low rate progressive...).

Some screens don't handle 1080i very well and make a mess of the deinterlacing. Perceptually the vertical definition should appear somewhere between equal-with to 1.5x that of 720p, and the horizontal always 1.5x... so it will always look better on material that's well suited to it, which is low motion material and low framerate movies. 720p is for sports and other fast motion stuff where pin-sharp resolution doesn't matter because your eye just can't track that well.
(And 1080p - high rez, high framerate progressive - takes twice the bandwidth of either, which a lot of connections and equipment just can't deal with).

However if they do cock it up and just smush the interlaced lines together, it ends up looking more like 540p resolution... at half the framerate of 720p.

Hence if your kit isn't up to scratch, or the engineer is too much of a numpty / too lazy to do the proper checks and set up the box to match your set, he'll just default to locking it down at a 720p max and leaving it like that. Most people who aren't well up on HD won't spot the difference (particularly as they'll be more wowed by the near-2x-each-way real world improvement 720p brings from standard def) or call him out on the BS. Thing is, the picture still won't be as good as it could be, as the box has to internally downconvert 1080i (and 1080p) to 720p anyway, which reduces the quality and can introduce its own artefacts.

I do have just the one friend with a VHD+ box at the moment (and an enoooorrrrmous TV... like, it must be 55 if not 60 inch) - ex GF of the expat, no less so it will be set up perfectly - so next time I'm round there I'll try to talk her into letting me have a poke in the settings/info readouts of both box and TV to see what's what, maybe whilst everyone else is dealing with pizza or something Smile

It certainly looks crisp enough when tuned to the HD channels to be a full 1080 image, and I don't just mean the pizza crust...


Last edited by tahrey on 18:27 - 23 Feb 2012; edited 1 time in total
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

carlosthejack...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 16 Aug 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 18:25 - 23 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now I've got a headache!
____________________
Responsibility. It's a difficult reality for some. I'm running the 2014 Sheffield Half Marathon on behalf of Bluebell Wood Childrens Hospice. Please sponsor me, even if it's just a quid.
DonnyBrago: "I think you may be confusing rain and napalm..." Paulington: "It's not what you ride, it's how you ride it."
Current rides: '05 VFR800 VTEC, '57 Mondeo 1.8 TDCi #58LEGEND
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website You must be logged in to rate posts

tahrey
World Chat Champion



Joined: 07 Jul 2010
Karma :

PostPosted: 18:46 - 23 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

my work here is done. see you in a fortnight :p

(sorry, I work with digital video, in part; it's a gods-damned nightmare sometimes. the main thing I can say is: buy a mac. like, some cheap secondhand POS. Use iMovie at whatever settings look good to you, and to hell with the disk space, as it's outrageously cheap even with half of thailand swimming in muddy water)
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

LordShaftesbu...
World Chat Champion



Joined: 03 Sep 2008
Karma :

PostPosted: 19:47 - 23 Feb 2012    Post subject: Reply with quote

tahrey wrote:


I know, but it's just a matter of Q. Is it worth the effort? A. Not reaaaally.
Like, 5 years ago? A. Probably, if you have a lot of discs.
10 years ago? A. Definitely (...but it'll take you a while)

Like, if your time is worth £6 an hour (or 10p a minute), and you can save maybe 20p's worth of disc space per movie... if you spend more than 2 minutes extra on each one setting up the conversion, checking on it as it goes, and previewing that it looks OK at the end, it's a waste.
(and how long researching it, downloading programs, testing things out etc to find the best method? I have one, rather old, well trusted direct ripper that works on 99%+ of all discs, and would otherwise be the input source for any DivX converter...)

If you're keen on swapping films with mates using memory sticks etc, then there's maybe more of a point ... but all the same, it only costs £5 these days for an 8Gb memory stick that's big enough to hold all but the very largest, boundary-pushing dual layer movie DVD... and they're almost endlessly re-usable.

Blu-Rays... sure, there's probably some worth to it for the next 5 years or so, until affordable external discs and common memory sticks are big enough to fit a couple hundred / a single BD each Wink

Alternatively there are some flashdisk players etc that won't accept DVD VOBs, or even demand you use only their format (and it's a lot easier to convert between two AVI formats if you've already done the hard work of converting from DVD)...


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
And be prepared for a world of pain if you're doing interlaced or telecined wibble foo


I almost understood some of that...


'twas kinda the point Very Happy
Problem is you may encounter that nonsense whilst ripping movies. A very good automated converter may deal with them just fine, but will more likely smush the output and leave you wishing you'd done it manually first time out. Whereas most DVD playing software makes a surprisingly good fist of it somehow.


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
edit:
when you say "down to 300", do you mean 300 resolution (lines, i guess?), 300 kbit/s bandwidth (pretty blinkin' low even for a DVD rip), or 300mb (ditto, but not *quite* as extreme) ?


No, I definitely meant 300 lines res, although I've downloaded a couple of very very sharp rips around 500ish lines, that are absolutely cracking quality, but the full 1080p stuff on that 10" screen is absolutely incredible!


Ah, I see what's happened here then Smile
Probably what you've got is somewhere around 640x352 or x360 for full-screen 16:9 material, or 640x288~304 for more cinemascopey stuff (what still has letterboxing even on a widescreen TV). It wouldn't have been 300 to start with, and you have lost some clarity, but not enough to be generally detectable. It's somewhat like watching a widescreen disc on a conventional TV, where the DVD player automatically letterboxes it, losing some lines of definition in the process. Far less will have been lost off the horizontal resolution because of the somewhat bonkers way widescreen DVDs work (they max out at 720 pixels across), so overall it still looks alright when scaled back up. 720x342 thru 405 would be better, but that's just being fussy.

For ultimate quality you want 720x576 with a file saved with the necessary re-scaling info and a player that can understand it, or failing that a stupidly oversampled 1024x576 file (or whatever the actual number of non-letterbox lines are in the picture and a horizontal figure to match, e.g. 848x480 for an american full-screen disc, or 1024x486/848x400 for a typical cinemascope UK/US-spec one).

But really 640x360 does the job alright most of the time, and it's the default iPlayer spec too unless you flick into it's strange halfway-house "HQ" (a slightly barmy 832x468 that matches nothing else on earth) or Hi-Def.

What's this 10" screen you mention, anyway? Small displays do have a habit of flattering poor quality source material. You really don't know how shit a VHS or VideoCD (or poorly recorded DVD!) is until you blow it up. I was happily watching effectively 200p (or less) VCDs on my 14" TV when that was pretty much state of the home recording art. These days only about half of them are still playable (cheap CDRs...) but I'm not really bothered by it, as they look horrendous on anything much larger.

1080 will of course look quite good as there's not many displays of that size (except, I think, a particular Sony Vaio one?) that exceed about 720~800 lines; many of them are only 600... And if it's a TV or a portable DVD player, chances are it's actually 480 or less, which is actually worse than UK standard-def.


Quote:
tahrey wrote:
My brother claims he's got decent BD rips at 1Gb


Any chance of finding out his secret?


Let me go squeeze that rock over there and see if it bleeds...

To be honest I doubt he's ripping them himself, he's a regular P2P terrorist. Made our router regularly break down (in what I could only conceptualise as electronic floods of tears) when we were both living at home.

Still, might be worth an ask, or at least for a few sample files that could be potentially analysed. It might just be that he's less picky than I am, and that BD has somewhat more redundancy (= good times, for compression algorithms) than a DVD where almost as much visual information is already squashed into fewer pixels.


tahrey wrote:
For reference, the 720p, not-exactly-full-motion, not-quite-FM-sound-quality material the BBC serves up as "HD" on the iPlayer runs at about 1.3Gb/hour...


VirginMedia HD is also only 720p too. The engineers reckon you're better of having your HD box set at 720- 'cos it gives a better picture than having it set at 1080p, which I can concur with...

Yeah, but they're Virgin Media engineers. A now ex-pat mate used to be line manager to a bunch of them, which basically involved trying to corral them to do any kind of work, apologise for and correct the bullshit they fed to the customers, and fix all the cock-ups they made with installations (as a result he was pretty shit-hot at the work himself, did a lovely job re-cabling our old house when we moved the rooms around). Let's just say I wouldn't trust them out of my sight if they were round my place, not that I have a hope of affording the service any time soon.

I would hope that the box is able to output 480/576i, 480/576p, 720p or 1080i (and 1080p, maybe?) depending on what the actual source material is. The thing with it is, (1280x)720p and (1920x)1080i, the two original HD standards that fit within about the same total bandwidth, are suited to different purposes. One is lower resolution, higher framerate progressive, and the other is higher resolution interlaced (= high rate interlace or low rate progressive...).

Some screens don't handle 1080i very well and make a mess of the deinterlacing. Perceptually the vertical definition should appear somewhere between equal-with to 1.5x that of 720p, and the horizontal always 1.5x... so it will always look better on material that's well suited to it, which is low motion material and low framerate movies. 720p is for sports and other fast motion stuff where pin-sharp resolution doesn't matter because your eye just can't track that well.
(And 1080p - high rez, high framerate progressive - takes twice the bandwidth of either, which a lot of connections and equipment just can't deal with).

However if they do cock it up and just smush the interlaced lines together, it ends up looking more like 540p resolution... at half the framerate of 720p.

Hence if your kit isn't up to scratch, or the engineer is too much of a numpty / too lazy to do the proper checks and set up the box to match your set, he'll just default to locking it down at a 720p max and leaving it like that. Most people who aren't well up on HD won't spot the difference (particularly as they'll be more wowed by the near-2x-each-way real world improvement 720p brings from standard def) or call him out on the BS. Thing is, the picture still won't be as good as it could be, as the box has to internally downconvert 1080i (and 1080p) to 720p anyway, which reduces the quality and can introduce its own artefacts.

I do have just the one friend with a VHD+ box at the moment (and an enoooorrrrmous TV... like, it must be 55 if not 60 inch) - ex GF of the expat, no less so it will be set up perfectly - so next time I'm round there I'll try to talk her into letting me have a poke in the settings/info readouts of both box and TV to see what's what, maybe whilst everyone else is dealing with pizza or something Smile

It certainly looks crisp enough when tuned to the HD channels to be a full 1080 image, and I don't just mean the pizza crust...


https://i39.tinypic.com/sce350.gif
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts
Old Thread Alert!

The last post was made 14 years, 48 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful?
  Display posts from previous:   
This page may contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a visitor clicks through and makes a purchase. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set.

Post new topic   Reply to topic    Bike Chat Forums Index -> The Geek Zone All times are GMT + 1 Hour
Page 1 of 1

 
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum

Read the Terms of Use! - Powered by phpBB © phpBB Group
 

Debug Mode: ON - Server: birks (www) - Page Generation Time: 0.09 Sec - Server Load: 0.53 - MySQL Queries: 14 - Page Size: 118.14 Kb