good DVD-rips are better than the original DVD?

[Yong]

ok, im extremely noob at ripping dvd,
as the title said, can someone explain to me, is it true? :confused:

here is some posts from other forum, which is related to my question:
http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/532035/+20#
Thanks ;)

[Dark Shikari]

Yes, the quality can be "better" if there are imperfections in the DVD source (such as inconsistent pulldown, bad telecining, bad mastering, etc) that can be fixed upon ripping.

This is especially true of anime.

Its no magic bullet though--not all problems can be fixed, and nothing is a magical "quality booster."

[Mug Funky]

i'd say you can't get better than a competently mastered DVD using just what's on the DVD...

but you can modify it to please yourself. it's just a matter of judging whether the subjective improvement is better than the extra generational loss.

[Dr.Khron]

it's just a matter of judging whether the subjective improvement is better than the extra generational loss.


Wow, you could write an entire book to explain that statement.

Point being, its a complicated topic. But yeah, if the source DVD material is of high quality, you really can't "improve" it. To Mug's point, you can make it LOOK like whatever you want ("hey, lets turn all the colors up way too high!"), but most people wouldn't consider that an improvement.

The only DVDs that can be truly improved are those that came from crappy source material, or were poorly encoded to begin with (or both). Thankfully, mainstream Hollywood releases tend to suffer from neither of these... so what does?

-Porn, particularly old video tape transfers
-Anime, particularly obscure titles and grey-market transfers
-Home videos, particularly old film transfers
-Low budget foreign films, like Bollywood

[Morte66]

I consider it a miserable failure if my DVD rips don't look better to my tastes than the original. That's my main reason for encoding -- to get better quality, not to backup or to save space. If the rip looks worse, I do it again. But I'm sure some people would think my processing makes things worse, because they have different tastes.

[It's probably important that I don't like grain/noise so I use a denoiser before encoding, and that my monitor makes a meal of the MPEG2 blocking that appears once you get rid of the noise so I use a deblocker. Those are two easy wins.]

[Sharktooth]

denoising + deblocking = details destroyed...

[olyteddy]

I like my backups better than my originals. I only back up the movie and no menus so if I fall asleep watching it I don't wake up to some stupid menu song looping over and over...:p

[*.mp4 guy]

Most profesional dvds are made from d1 masters, which are analog, so there is usually some analog fuzziness, and ringing, removing it can often give a large percieved boost in quality, but its hard to do properly.

[Shakey_Jake33]

The bottom line is that you obviously cannot *add* detail to the source, and anything you do to it such as noise reduction, deblocking, sharpening or whetever, is simpy altering the image, which may look nice, but your not restoring anything, just changing it.

It's a personal preference thing. I personally rip my DVD's as VOB, so it's pretty clear what side of the fence I sit on :)

[Mug Funky]

@ *.mp4 guy:

source?

btw D1 = digital (i think 10-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed. not sure). that's what the "d" stands for.

typically a DVD comes off the best source available to the authoring house. usually digibeta (digital, 90mbps I-frame), sometimes beta SP (analog component), and sometimes something else (depending on what's available. archival stuff will vary greatly).

i've never even used a D1 deck. i hear they're very big and old.

[*.mp4 guy]

For whatever reason, it seems that all D1 sources are captured through component video, making the format essentially analog. You can see the horizontal ringing from this analog step on just about every comercial dvd.

[edit]
One of the only dvd's I have ever seen that obviously was never put through an analog stage during mastering is the Ghost In The Shell special edition, though unfortunately all of the Stand Alone Complex dvds (that I've seen) have been through analog land, even though they are supposed to be from HD masters.

[Mug Funky]

that's unfortunate. i'm not sure if D1 is the culprit here though - pretty much every flavour of digital tape deck has component and composite outputs as options, for backward compatibility with the huge legacy of analog gear still out there (TV stations in australia were still primarily using 1-inch tapes for broadcast just 3 years ago. 1-inch tape, though stunning quality, is still analog composite). that said, the (very) vast majority of tape rooms that are equipped with digital gear will be using SDI as the backbone - this transmits 10-bit 4:2:2, and if you go dual-link you can go all the way up to 2k 4:4:4 at 10 bit (2048x1556, YUV or RGB at 10 bits - this is high enough quality to print back to film).

however, of the DVD masters i've seen, the vast majority have been digital betacam. of course, there is always the possibility of an analog transfer happening at some stage down the line - by the time a program has made it to the authoring house, it will have been dubbed for distribution in many other forms, all of which could potentially be then dubbed to a "DVD master" from there.

but the only digibetas i've seen with composite crawlies were some anime ones from (i think) Geneon or Sunrise. it's been quite a while since i was making DVDs, so i can't remember all that well :). however, when i was doing encodes i'd check the masters with "blue only" switched on, making crawlies show up really obviously, and not much stuff had them.

these days i'm either mastering to DV, beta SP, digibeta or HDCAM SR, depending on how much the client can afford.

[Honeyko]

Yes, the quality can be "better" if there are imperfections in the DVD source (such as inconsistent pulldown, bad telecining, bad mastering, etc) that can be fixed upon ripping.
Others: Flaky menus, flaky chapters, edge-crumminess in need of cropping. (E.g., "Superman Doomsday" has several uncropped columns of black+crud on the right edge.)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Others: Flaky menus, flaky chapters, edge-crumminess in need of cropping. (E.g., "Superman Doomsday" has several uncropped columns of black+crud on the right edge.)If you want to see a movie with poorly positioned black mattes, try watching the NTSC and PAL DVD releases of Bladerunner (Directors Cut)....

[dbzgundam]

For whatever reason, it seems that all D1 sources are captured through component video, making the format essentially analog. You can see the horizontal ringing from this analog step on just about every comercial dvd.

[edit]
One of the only dvd's I have ever seen that obviously was never put through an analog stage during mastering is the Ghost In The Shell special edition, though unfortunately all of the Stand Alone Complex dvds (that I've seen) have been through analog land, even though they are supposed to be from HD masters.

Is this referring to anime or live action (hollywood)? Most hollywood level commercial discs are mastered all digital these days. If not originating from some 2k transfer, it's usually at least HD level, and production is becoming so streamlined from NLE -> DVD/HD that you can easily see distinctions between what elements in the movie exist solely in the digital realm, and what was transferred (Rather than printed back out to film and retransferred).

As for anime, there are lots of examples of crappy discs, but most digitally produced shows, or remastered cel-based shows have been taken from proper digital elements. In GITS:SAC's case, I thought the major problem was edge enhancement, not an analogue transfer. I'm not calling you a liar, but Bandai did try to put quite a bit of effort into those releases (not to mention the discs being fairly recent), so I'd be surprised if an analogue conversion took place.

[*.mp4 guy]

Well, It could, maybe, be really horribly done edge enhancement, the thing is the edges are blured, and have concentric ringing around them on the horizontal axis, which looks decidedly analog. I'm not saying it makes sense, but I can get much better looking downsamples from HD myself, sharper and with less ringing then whats on the SAC dvds, using plain bicubic, or bilinear; so I can only assume that they were analog at some point because its the only way I can think to explain their quality.

[*.mp4 guy]

[double post], meh

Here (http://rapidshare.com/files/63490586/ringing.demuxed.m2v.html) is an example of what I'm talking about, its an unprocessed clip cut from the begining of Stealth, there is clear horizontal ringing/echo, but no vertical counterpart, the video is, on the whole, rather blurry, and generally doesn't look like a pure digital transfer.

[/double post]

[scharfis_brain]

nope, doesn't look analogue.

in fact analogue video can look much crisper...

most dvds these days are put through a blur-sharpen combo.
I dunno why they do these braindead things, but I assume they want to
- reduce interlace flicker
- reduce the risk of compression artifacts by eliminating fine details
- boost their HD-stuff sales by saying: "look you stupid customer: our Blau-Strahl-Scheibe ( :p ) looks soooo much better"

Warner and Sony discs often are blur/sharpened to hell.
Paramount disc (especially the PAL ones) are most times of very nice quality!

[dbzgundam]

nope, doesn't look analogue.

in fact analogue video can look much crisper...

most dvds these days are put through a blur-sharpen combo.
I dunno why they do these braindead things, but I assume they want to
- reduce interlace flicker
- reduce the risk of compression artifacts by eliminating fine details
- boost their HD-stuff sales by saying: "look you stupid customer: our Blau-Strahl-Scheibe ( :p ) looks soooo much better"

Warner and Sony discs often are blur/sharpened to hell.
Paramount disc (especially the PAL ones) are most times of very nice quality!

Haven't had the time to look at the sample, but I'd have to agree with Scharfis on this one. It is not uncommon for many DVDs to blur-sharpen video for the above mentioned reasons. I'd think that this could be now done for the whole sale boosting reason, but it's been done for years now (and yes, Sony is notorious for it), so I don't think it's a particular reason...

And yes, I've done HD downsamples many times to test this out, and they're often a lot better. Think about it though. Many HD versions (even HDTV) look far superior when downscaled to SD vs. the DVD, but the transfer is the same in many cases, particularly with newer movies; doesn't that make you think that the processing is done at the SD level?

[setarip_old]

On the other hand, the Standard DVD of the most recent version of "King Kong", heavily CGI, is remarkable crisp - even when compressed to approximately 50%...

[*.mp4 guy]

Well, could someone please explain to me why they are bluring the horizontal axis more heavily then the vertical then? If they intend to reduce interlace flicker the only sane thing to do is to use a vertical lowpass filter; Which it would apear they didn't do, or atleast not to the extent that they screwed the horizontal axis. Anyway, IMO it doesn't really matter where this sort of effect comes from, the point I was making while referncing this effect is still just as valid if they are braindead enough to do this purpose.

[edit]

If the artifacting was caused by a blur/sharpen operation, why is there clearly defined ringing on the horizontal axis and none on the vertical, as shown in this image (http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/2866/ringing2hr3.png) (same source as the previous sample, no processing besides pointresize).

[Mug Funky]

perhaps it was passed through a noise reducer somewhere down the line? you can never really be sure what those things are really doing, as the documentation for them is scarce and laced with marketing guff.

it's certainly not analog, and in fact i'd have no problem at all with a DVD of this quality (well, there's some blocking/ringing going on but that's certainly not an analog thing, and i suspect if there were motion-blur on that text even this stuff would not really be visible except frame-by-frame).

even downsampled HD would look something like this depending on how the VTR was set up - it looks just like the a and b parameters of a bicubic filter have been tweaked.

an analog transfer would have thin black bars at the sides, rather than going out to full 720 width.

hmm... i just had a close look at a raw transfer done on the Ursa at work, and it looks like there's a tiny amount of this ringing happening here. i'd have to run some formal tests, but i'd say the culprit is either the horizontal aperture correction, something in the tube alignment (maybe afterglow correction? way too hard to tell - i'm not a telecine engineer), or the noise reducer is applying some kind of sharpen that i didn't tell it to apply.

either way the effect is small, and this transfer is all digital - super16 -> Ursa 4:4:4 -> DVNR @ 4:4:4 -> SDI 4:2:2 -> miniDV 4:2:0.

i wont bother investigating further on this though, as the above machine is put to better use doing actual film transfers :)

[smok3]

if the source of this blur/shrapen is actually a telecine machine, then this actually may have something to do with the machine expecting analog dump - think betacam sp (like: lets increase the 'knees' for this poor frequency limited machine...)?

[Mug Funky]

i don't know why anyone would want to make a telecine softer...

i think we'd probably need some side-by-side comparisons to make much sense of this - the sample i saw was really quite good in my opinion. any sharper and it's likely to be aliased.

but FWIW my vote goes to a resizer or noise reducer in the chain somewhere.

something as simple as re-rendering the timeline in an edit suite could cause this kind of blurring. i've certainly spotted quicktime-esque colour shifts in some english titles for japanese shows before, which would imply at least some yuv-to-rgb-back-to-yuv stuff has happened (quicktime just cannot get it right... they don't appear to have a standard matrix for rgb to yuv for any codec, and they've still got broken chroma upsampling for 4:2:0 codecs like PAL DV). in fact the only way i've ever been able to re-insert ex-RGB material without error is to use qtinput and qtoutput in avisynth... that's a pretty useful thing.