film-source PAL DVDs: potentially better PQ when upscaled by well-designed player?

[A.Fenderson]

I've got the Oppo DV 981-HD (http://www.oppodigital.com/dv981hd/dv981hd_features.asp), which features DCDi by Faroudja for deinterlacing & upscaling. This unit can be easily modded via remote code for region-free playback, and has "Direct PAL/NTSC disc and TV compatibility and system conversion," so it can read PAL discs.

Since PAL film-based DVDs should be encoded for 576p (I hope), could this player potentially produce a better upscaled-picture from a PAL film disc versus the NTSC version disc of the same release? Or does perhaps this and other players have some unfortunate algorithm that would involve converting PAL to NTSC (480 lines) prior to upconverting to 720p/1080i/1080p?

Also: I've never watched a PAL-based film DVDs--for those discs that use 2:2 pulldown and the 4% speed increase, for anyone reading this please comment on if this speed change is noticeable to you if you're used to watching film-based DVDs in their NTSC versions. Also any subjective comments on "Euro-pulldown" (2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3) etc are welcome.

Further: does anyone here know what revision of the Mediatek MT1389 chip is used in this player? Conflicting reports point to the EE and FE.

Thank you.

update: received the following reply from Oppo Support asking about the 981 HD:

The player can natively decode at up to 720x576 (50Hz) and 720x480 (60Hz) before scaling it to your output resolution for all supported media sources, including DVD-Video and DivX/XviD.

Best Regards,

Customer Service
OPPO Digital, Inc.
2629B Terminal Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
Service@oppodigital.com
Tel: 650-961-1118
Fax: 650-961-1119

[GibsonXXI]

I live in a PAL region. I don't know much about upscaling, but i'll say this on the subject of regions, based on what i know, and what i've read...

If the DVD is live action, and not anime, and it's a blockbuster release, the chances are that it *may* have been recorded to PAL from the original 24fps FILM source. In which case you'd be well placed to try what you suggest.

Your TV will need to be capable of playing Progressive PAL content as well as your DVD player though.

If it's anime, or a low budget film, forget it. These types of source are often directly norm-converted from NTSC to PAL by the way of field blending. Which is an absolute nightmare to deal with if you wish to transcode.

Personally, i think your better off just attempting to upscale NTSC. Any upscaled source will look poor compared to the authentic HD version. whether it's worth the effort is at best, subjective, and only you can decide.

But while you may buy a dozen PAL DVD's that are direct from film, there's also the possibility that you might also buy a dozen that turn out to have been field blended from NTSC and so you'd be wasting your money.

NTSC is after all the standard used in the US, the home of Hollywood. So the likelyhood of not getting a dud, even with well known films is likely to be no better than 40-50% at best.

[A.Fenderson]

Thanks for the reply!

Although the Oppo player can do any framerate etc conversions necessary (A/NTSC <-> PAL), your information and the inability to easily find cheap PAL movie DVDs has pretty much led me to abandon this potential project.

It would be interesting to test if I can subjectively notice any quality difference between an upscaled NTSC disc and (for the same movie) an upscaled PAL disc that was sourced from the film, but otherwise I don't think I'll be going anywhere with this.

Thanks again for the info, though.

[Ghitulescu]

I also live in a PAL country.

Finding NTSC and PAL DVDs is an easy task, here, with eBay or on the fleamarket (we still have American troops here :)). The problem is to find the exact correspondence, ie both DVDs should have been made from the same material, otherwise you'll be fooled by the quality of the source and the preprocessing done. Image quality is not only measured in the number of pixels.

This site makes comparisons of the quality of the film transfers -> http://www.dvdbeaver.com/FILM/DVDReviews10/the_scarlet_empress_.htm - The link is for The Scarlet Empress which appeared both in PAL and NTSC.

A good place to check some differences between various releases of the same movie would be -> http://www.schnittberichte.com/index.php. As its name says, it concerns mainly the "cut parts" (censorship, missing pieces, marketing etc.).

[von_Runkel]

Did you read this line in the tech specs:

•PAL/NTSC disc and TV compatible with automatic or manual system conversion

"System conversion" sounds like PAL->NTSC or NTSC->PAL conversion. You may have made a right decision when you abandoned this idea. I have a DVD player that tries to do this with my NTSC discs (PAL country here) and it looks awful. I can tell, because I authored the discs myself and expected a clean NTSC output.

[Lyris]

Since PAL film-based DVDs should be encoded for 576p (I hope)
You hoped wrong - most of them are incoded in Field mode without the Progressive flags set! Nightmare.

For that reason, the player treats everything as Interlaced and then detects the cadence of the material. It ignores the flags stored on the disc, since they are usually wrong.

could this player potentially produce a better upscaled-picture from a PAL film disc versus the NTSC version disc of the same release? Or does perhaps this and other players have some unfortunate algorithm that would involve converting PAL to NTSC (480 lines) prior to upconverting to 720p/1080i/1080p?
No well-designed player would go from 576 -> 480 -> 1080. I can tell you for a fact that the Oppo does not.

However, whether or not a PAL title will show a visible difference when compared to the NTSC one is a different issue. Often, the PAL version will look much the same as the NTSC counterpart despite the higher resolution, due to the amount of low-pass filtering applied. Sometimes, the PAL will look better (and sometimes the NTSC will look better). The NTSC version will almost always look better from a compression point of view, because NTSC film titles are almost always encoded with Pulldown flags in the stream.

A good example: American Beauty from Dreamworks. I own the US NTSC and UK PAL versions and they are both awful in terms of picture detail.

Also: I've never watched a PAL-based film DVDs--for those discs that use 2:2 pulldown and the 4% speed increase, for anyone reading this please comment on if this speed change is noticeable to you if you're used to watching film-based DVDs in their NTSC versions.
Yes, very.
Some titles are pitch-corrected to try and disguise the faster playback speed; these are less irritating (to me at least).

For what it's worth, the chipset used in the Oppo 981 (Genesis Microchip FLI2300) is better than most at Deinterlacing, but its scaling algorithm is crude by modern standards. It introduces a lot of ringing and also introduces the infamous "Faroudja macroblocking error". Usually with these machines, the best output is gained from using the 480p/576p mode and letting the display device handle the scaling.

Further: does anyone here know what revision of the Mediatek MT1389 chip is used in this player? Conflicting reports point to the EE and FE.No idea, sorry. I believe it's a custom Oppo variation and is the same as the one used in the Oppo 980H (a one-chip player where the Mediatek chip performs all of the delacing and scaling. I actually worked with Oppo Europe and Mediatek in getting this player to detect the 2-2 cadence for PAL movies properly).

[SeeMoreDigital]

Have any of you tried: -

Extracting the progressive PAL 720x576 MPEG-2 video stream to an elementary 25.000fps .M2V stream


Use "ReStream" to reduce the speed from 25.000fps to 23.976fps


Use DGPulldown to add pull-down fields (ie: 23.976-to-29.970) to the elementary stream - This step is only required if you intend to create DVD spec compliant files.

Obviously you will have to reduce the speed of the elementary AC3 audio stream too.

Anyway, even though the video streams resolution is still 720x576, it should play okay on an NTSC DVD player.


Cheers

[von_Runkel]

@SeeMore Digital
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the idea of DGPulldown to encode a 720x576 video at 720x480 resolution at a framerate of ~~18-30 without touching the audio?

Just applying intelligently laid out repeat flags to reach a frame rate of 30000/1001 compatible with NTSC?