DVD ripping and Macro Blocks a better solution than just Ripping.

[GP100]

This is what I did and I was wondering if anybody else noticed or did this. As some of you know, when ripping a DVD that is either live action or Camcorder recorded. If you make it into an SVCD you will get allot of macro blocks in the picture, especially in the high action scenes. I first noticed this in (markrb will like this) the Patriots Superbowl DVD. The DVD looked great the SVCD sucked. All the high action blocks were bad. I tried all the suggestions. Encoding 4 passes, image quality priority up around 25, sharpening, temporal smoother, multiple tests with no luck. So just to see what would happen I have ATI all in wonder card. I do video capture with the satellite and home video tapes. I thought I’d try and capture the DVD with the card then convert in DVD2SVCD.

Now my machine I do this on is an XP1700, 512 meg DDR ram, 80 gig s Maxtor 133’s Raid, with the all in wonder card and I can capture easily the DVD setting in the ATI capture software no problems VBR 8000, 720x480, Mpeg 2. Then I just rename it to a vob and throw that into DVD2SVCD and get the SVCD’s. Now doing that with a long either a 4 pass or the highest setting TMPG setting CQ setting (Which seems to me at least work a little better with this capture) The macro blocks for the most part are gone or significantly reduced. CCE seems sharper, but a little more blocks. TMPG seems not as sharp but less blocks. This is a compromise as to a true DVD. But it seems to work allot better than just a direct rip of which I was terribly disappointed. I was wondering if anybody did this or noticed this and I’m open to any other suggestions and I wanted to share what I saw.

[gerti67]

Hi GP100,

the problem with Camcorder (DV AVI miniDV) or Live action DVDs is that they're almost always encoded interlaced - so you get those macroblocks when converting them.

So you have two choices: 1) encode and keep them interlaced (heavy task to get decent quality, needs some tweaking of the settings) or 2) deinterlace them (results in nearly no macroblocks but depending on the deinterlace filter used you loose some picture detail).

For both ways there are a lot of suggestions here in the forums just try to search for "interlaced encode" or something similar. Here in this forum there is also a newer thread dealing with this topic for some STNG DVDs IIRC.

Hope this helps,
Gerti

[GP100]

gerti67,

Thankyou very much for pointing me in the right direction. As you stated

1) encode and keep them interlaced (heavy task to get decent quality, needs some tweaking of the settings)

Which I did but not to a decent satisfaction, for the results which prompted me into trying to recapture the picture.

First test just with CCE at CBR showed maked improvements on the macro blocks. With Smartdeinterlace checked. I'll try a bunch of settings now to see what I like, More testing :D Thankyou again!

Cheers :D