NTSC or PAL: Quality from Oppo 981HD?

[BassPig]

I'm trying to decide on a rare film from Japan. There's a Japanese version that is NTSC, region 2, and there's a UK version that is PAL, region 2. I have a Oppo 981 HD that has been 'de-regionalized' and an InFocus IN82 projector. The projector supports PAL, but I usually do DVD upscaling in the player and output 24P to the projector.

Here's my question:
What renders good quality (minimal artifacts)... playing NTSC version of the disc (525 line system) and upscaling to the PJ, or playing the PAL version, converting to NTSC and upscaling to the PJ?

NOTE: Is PAL DVD capable of non-interlaced encoding? That may make an important difference if the NTSC is progressive 24P and the PAL is interlaced.

There are some assumptions here, which maybe someone can confirm or deny: that simply setting the player to output PAL won't produce a proper 1080P upscale from the PAL disc.. maybe that's not true?

Point of consideration: there's more spacial picture information in the PAL version. Given that, I wonder if I might get a slight resolution gain by upscaling the PAL? But the benefits might be lost in the conversion, unless the Oppo 981HD can do it's upscale magic from PAL disc without converting to NTSC first.

Can anyone familiar with Oppo DVD players weigh in on the pros and cons of NTSC vs. PAL upscaling, to an HD projector? (I hope I've stated my question clearly enough--I know it's a confusing issue that's prone to misinterpretation, especially across various languages.)

[nhakobian]

NOTE: Is PAL DVD capable of non-interlaced encoding? That may make an important difference if the NTSC is progressive 24P and the PAL is interlaced.


Yes. A common feature is when importing US made 24p films is to speed it up to 25p and encode that way (audio is faster, sometimes pitch correction is added).

Not quite sure about the correct answer to your other questions.

[BassPig]

I have heard of that being done for theatrical releases. Sped up by 4.1%, which is kind of a lot. But good on the PAL Progressive scan.

[ChiDragon]

I've heard that even though the content is progressive, the majority of PAL DVDs are encoded in interlaced mode. So progressive scan players have to check the image content and decide whether to deinterlace or not.

You need to consider the quality of the releases themselves before what your playback chain will do with them. Depending on the rarity of the film, it is possible that there is only either an NTSC master or a PAL master being used and one is standards-converted from the other (field blending etc.).

[BassPig]

That's helpful.

I'm testing my setup now with a 1953 British film in PAL format on DVD. What I found is that the Oppo must be in Video Mode 2, else there's aliasing on horizontal lines. The content looks artifact-free on this old film, which is somewhat soft and grainy (maybe shot 16mm format?) The Oppo is doing the upscaling to 1080P 50Hz mode in this case. I have the P/N mode set to 'auto'. If I set to NTSC, I get some artifacts with horizontal edges.

It looks fine when set up "properly", but I still wonder if I'm seeing better than what I would see on NTSC DVD or not. The film does not have enough sharp detail to really give out those tell-tale clues of resolution limits. It just looks like old film, projected from a film projector. If I had some really sharp material on DVD in PAL, I might be able to see the difference of the extra 100 scan lines, but certainly not in this old material.

The other issue that cropped up is that subtitles look bad! They look like they've been resized horizontally by about 30% because alternating vertical strokes are thick and thin and letters like "V" look slightly chopped. Wondering if this is just a lousy subtitle encoded on the disc, or another artifact of PAL to NTSC conversion or PAL to 1080P conversion?

[Motenai Yoda]

I think u need compare both them on pc, ie with avs, to find the best ones, btw usually ntsc dvds are 60i telecined, with a simple tivtc (or ignoring soft pulldown flag) u can achieve a 24p video without artifacts. Also isn't uncommon for pal dvds to be field-blended or worse.

[BassPig]

I've only got the PAL movie that arrived in the mail today. It's got a bigger pixel dimension as viewed at 1X scale in VLC Media Player and appears to be progressive. The 'extras' at the end are bloody obviously interlaced by comparison. I watched it via my Oppo DV981HD non-region player and it looked quite clean on the InFocus IN82 projected onto a 12 foot screen. The limiting factor was apparently the source material, which was probably some analog master tape. Subtitles on this film looked okay, as compared with the old film I viewed the other day.

I tried to make a rip of the DVD and de-region it, but the interleaving of PGCs was real funky on this title and the ripped copy kept switching back and forth between the main film and the story board version every 1.5 seconds or so in VLC Media Player. ImgBurn complained that there was no place for a layer break, so I downloaded VOB Blanker and tried that, but the resulting DVD only plays for about two minutes and then restarts at the beginning. I was hoping the de-regioned disc would play on my Oppo BDP 83 and offer even better video quality. So I'm dependent completely on my 981 HD 100%.

[ChiDragon]

Maybe try the AnyDVD free trial to remove the region code?

[Lyris]

What renders good quality (minimal artifacts)... playing NTSC version of the disc (525 line system) and upscaling to the PJ, or playing the PAL version, converting to NTSC and upscaling to the PJ?


The NTSC native version (all else being equal).

I don't recall how the Oppo 981 does it exactly, but hardware conversions on playback aren't a good idea. Especially for PAL content, since as ChiDragon indicated, most PAL films on DVD are encoded interlaced even although the underlying content is progressive. It'll likely get put through interlaced scaling as a result and create jaggies.

Point of consideration: there's more spacial picture information in the PAL version. Given that, I wonder if I might get a slight resolution gain by upscaling the PAL?
You might, if it was upscaled well, but most DVDs are not very well encoded (from my experience) that the small resolution gain on the PAL version is likely to mean little. It might even be squandered by the interlaced encoding type (assuming the Japanese version is encoded with repeat field flags).

I've only got the PAL movie that arrived in the mail today. It's got a bigger pixel dimension as viewed at 1X scale in VLC Media Player and appears to be progressive
It will look progressive to the eye and effectively be progressive content, but it's very likely it was encoded interlaced.