Log in

View Full Version : A thought about DivX and Corona DVD players...


RadicalEd
25th June 2002, 22:59
I just thought of something silly. Isn't it kind of stupid that DivX networks and Microsoft want DivX and Corona support in DVD players? The idea behind that principal is that people could download video and burn it to watch, right? Well, if this is an end-user approach, then they're begging for a wad of confusion. Why is that? Well, an issue as stupid as aspect ratio. People are going to be encoding and downloading at 640 x 480, 320 x 240, 512 x 384, whatever. The point is that it will and should be 1:1 pixel 4:3 ar. But wait... for this junk to be any good on TV, it would have to be 704 x 480, 352 x 240, 560 x 384, right? Of course. TV suffers from 11/10 pixel ar. Now it may seem menial, but won't this introduce a whole slew of problems for people? DVD player's resizing algorithms use something similar to simple resize and therefore such a small resize would cause a whole lot of stairstepping and vertical artifacts (you try doing a simple resize of 320 x 240 material to 352, it aint pretty). Unless a better resize method is implemented into these players, users are going to have to resize and re-encode the files prior to burning, which pretty much defeats the purpose as one could just as easily re-encode to VCD.

Perhaps this is a really stupid point but (I needed to blow 10 minutes) it seemed like a valid concern and (I really needed something to do) it was so simple that nobody had thought of it and (bored) although the advantages would probably outweigh this little discrepancy (boredom is dangerous) it seems like it could cause some crap at least on the user and mass encoder level (dododo) at any rate (maybe I should go to the arcade and play ddr) I thought I'd get an opinion from the *other* geniuses on this forum. Okay, I'm gonna go and sit and stare at the screen until somebody replies because I'm that bored.

mpucoder
25th June 2002, 23:19
As for me, I'd leave the resolutions as DVD compliant. Let players such as ZoomPlayer adjust for the square pixels on your computer.

RadicalEd
26th June 2002, 00:06
mm.. I use BSplayer and I'm pretty sure from the looks of it that it uses simple resize. ffdshow allows for bicubic or bilinear resizing.. but (and I know how much my opinion matters ee) I think square pel is a much better way to encode, because honestly most of the people who download this stuff arent going to know how to set what in ffdshow and are going to be using wmp anyway and not bsplayer or zoomplayer. And aside from that square pel for digital video is better because its native environment is the monitor.

HDTV supports square pel, so perhaps that is a potential solution.


My 133th post, as in 1.33... it's some kind of deranged sign o.O