Why are people resizing?

[Bathrone]

A 720x576 pal DVD can display a 16:9 image. Why are people dropping the resolution to get widescreen when they could simply be patching the par? And not loose pixels?

[scharfis_brain]

- AVI doesn't support this.

- other Containers supporting this (mkv ?!) are not accepted enough to be interchangeable without problems.

- Full D1 resolution needs too much bitrate for one- or two-CD rencodes.

[squid_80]

With AR signalling you don't have much control over how the resizing is done i.e. which algorithm is used. If you do it before encoding you know exactly what you're getting. Not that I can notice the difference, but I know people who claim they don't like how the renderer does things.

[CruNcher]

@scharfis_brain
all MediaTek based Standalones support AR Signaling through the Mpeg-4 Bitstream via AVI so it works quiet well.
also Full D1 for a 2h Hollywood Movie should be no problem today on 1CD (700 MB) with an advanced Video Codec

Note: Not all Zoran based Player can parse the AR signaling inside the Bitstream if it's embedded in a AVI container but all MediaTek Based 1389 Player with a recent firmware have no problem with this you can also see that results in my EDP test following my Signiture Link.

[Morte66]

A 720x576 pal DVD can display a 16:9 image. Why are people dropping the resolution to get widescreen when they could simply be patching the par? And not loose pixels?

I think "to get file sizes suitable for CD backup or peer to peer upload (about 750kbps)" probably has something to do with it.

I backup my PAL DVDs to DVD-R on a slow PC, so I'm more concerned about time than size. The first time I used AutoGordianKnot for a movie backup, it looked worse than DVD Shrink because of the default resizing. Nowadays, when I use Xvid I normally make a 720x576 encoding. If it's anamorphic, so be it, and I'll manually switch the player to stretch mode if need be.

I usually encode 720x576 2 pass at about 1500kbps for TV box sets, or single pass q=2 to backup a single movie. Quality is very satisfactory this way. But for the sort of file sizes you see on peer-to-peer, I'd have to drop the resolution. I've tried doing 720x576 at 750kbps, and Xvid had a cow.

[Slitheen]

A 720x576 pal DVD can display a 16:9 image. Why are people dropping the resolution to get widescreen when they could simply be patching the par? And not loose pixels?

To keep the same resolution, you'd have to keep the bitrate very high. Then why not just keep as MPEG2.

[Backflip]

I've found that the number one thing is - there's no one stop croncrete (all things explained) guide on using PAR correctly (I'm still getting my head around it now, and I've been trying to for a few months how :P), so not as many people use it. Most automatically use the crop / square pixel option.

[CWR03]

I resize because I use a media PC on my TV for playing files, or watch them on my computer monitor. Cropping and resizing to have only the widescreen video remaining makes the most sense for me, since the software player always retains the resolution and there's no wasted bitrate.

[Morte66]

To keep the same resolution, you'd have to keep the bitrate very high. Then why not just keep as MPEG2.

Well, not really. I backup 720x576 at 1500kbps Xvid and get good quality. Using DVD-RB and Hank's Coder, I need something like 4000kbps to get the same quality in MPEG2.

I sometimes have to go down to 2800kbps or so for DVD9 to DVD5 backups. That doesn't look so great in MPEG2, but Xvid 720x576 (4:3 or 16:9) will make a near-perfect copy. IMHO it has its place at the difficult end of DVD backup (with DVD Shrink and/or DVD-RB for easier stuff), before you have to drop the resolution to put things on CDs.

[DigitalDeviant]

I guess I'm the odd one since I resize my NTSC DVD content up to 848x480 or higher, usually involving some filtering to try to preserve or even enhance detail. To me this looks better than encoding at the original resolution and anamorphicly resizing. Speed and filesize aren't really an issue with me though.

[darkavatar1470]

I guess I'm the odd one since I resize my NTSC DVD content up to 848x480 or higher, usually involving some filtering to try to preserve or even enhance detail. To me this looks better than encoding at the original resolution and anamorphicly resizing. Speed and filesize aren't really an issue with me though.
well, I'm with you, but some times i'll go all the way to something that touches the native rez of my LCD.....can't accept any bit of plain quick'n'dirty bilinear resizing you know....

[Morte66]

I guess I'm the odd one since I resize my NTSC DVD content up to 848x480 or higher, usually involving some filtering to try to preserve or even enhance detail. To me this looks better than encoding at the original resolution and anamorphicly resizing. Speed and filesize aren't really an issue with me though.

I'd love to do this...

I've seen some very nice stuff done with ffdshow post-processing in Zoom Player (de-noise, superior resize to 1600xNNN for my monitor, sharpen) but my PC just has no hope of doing that in real time. I tried doing the same processing during backup with Gordian KNot and Avisynth and it looked great. But it scaled to 40 hours to process and backup the whole movie in "ersatz HD". Oh well, one day...