Nifty XviD for HDTV encoding.

[trbarry]

I finally installed XviD last night and tried a short test encoding of a 1280x720 HDTV cap. Nothing fancy, but I used 2-pass internal with MPEG quantization to keep the most detail.

HDTV caps are usually aready very clean but sometimes already a bit filtered as part of the mpeg2 encoding they've gone through. So I wanted it as crisp as possible. No resize either.

At 4 mbits/sec I think it shows a bit more detail than Divx4.

I'll probably use this from now on. Good work guys. :)

- Tom

[MaTTeR]

Same here. I'm now encoding full time with XviD. After 2 tests encoding to a 1 CD and 2 tests of 2 CDs, I'm absolutely sold. I'm seeing better detail than in Div3 and especially DivX4. Effects such as smoke, water and fog appears to be more realistic as well.

HDTV...yummy. I need to make that move as well:)

[vinetu]

Hi trbarry,
I'm wonder about the real resolution of the HDTV file You tested.
For example the real resolution of the *.vobs in the "6-th day" and "THE MUMMY RETURNS" (both PAL)
are 720x576 with 16:9 flag (I guess) and total picture resolution while playing - 1024x576 (because of black borders on
top and bottom the movies Aspect Ratio is 2.35:1).
May be HDTV streams resolution is ???x720 and is streched to 1280x720 by HDTV hardware ?

[trbarry]

vintue -

Besides eyeballing it I have no way of knowing what original resolution the movie (Alien Res) was digitized at. But here in the Detroit area ABC transmits in ATSC 1280x720p @ 60 resolution and that was what I captured, and believe this was a true HD movie, unlike the regular 480i shows they also send in 720p. Other station send 1920x1088i, sometimes real and sometimes cheap upconverts.

But even the upconverts make clean digital captures. They just take longer to process and I resize them smaller.

For this test I left the size at 1280x720 but IVTC'd it down to 24 fps, on the assumption that it was film based and that's all there really were anyhow.

(I guess you'd call it IVTC. Even though it was progressive it had likely gone through some telecine process so I reversed it with a combination of SelectEven & GreedyHMA)

- Tom

[vinetu]

Thanks, Tom !