DVD filtering fear - sharpnes is the key to quality!

[trodas]

Hi, dudes. I need an expert advise from someone, whos familiar with WinDVD decoding filters.
The problem.
I fear, that - same as DivX films doing - the picture get blurred after decoding (simply deblocking the mpeg boxes), because othervise it cant be scalled into any way.

Why? You cant scalle really sharp image w/o getting ugly jagged edges. And because most users are pretty dumb, the solution (add deblocking) is made as easy solution, to give users scaled playback w/o their complaings.

The truth is, that anything scaled has got a degraded quality (this is pretty obivous). Any when this is blurred AND then scalled - it gets only worse.

Thats why i desperately searching for two things:
a) how to disable the deblocking to gain a sharp image
b) how to convice someone at nVidia to allo users enable double-refresh - because to get the fullscreen playback, we have to get a resolution for it - no, scalling is NOT a option. So, look, how 640x480 resolution looking on 17" monitor. Ugly, right? These black bars all over the screen, right? Thats the damn microlines. And know what? You can get completely RIGHT of it! Just enable the doublescan. Look at 512x384 resolution. Its beauty, right? There are enabled the doublescan...

So, you probably get the idea. Use 512, 640 and defined 720 resolutions for DivX playback - decode the DivX w/o any blurring filters and got a nice fullscreen image.

I do that for DVDs already. Defined 856x640 resolution, and using DVDsubber to play the DVDs notscalled and fullscreen. The quality is simply amazing. First at all, 856x640 resolution are itself SHARP and nice, and the nonscalled DVD are also great on it!

But i fear!
I fear, that the WinDVD decoding filters might do anything like the DivX crapy decoding filters - blurr the image.
Tought on DVD i see the scaling, when its done, i still fear about any possible deblocking done there.

Can anyone confirm me, that there is nothing like that, or how to get rid of this for god...???

Please... :(

[DJ Bobo]

640x480 isn't ugly at all.
When you look very closely, you may see the lines. But if you watch as everybody does, say 2 meters from the monitor, you won't notice anything. You'll just see a very sharp image with a very high refresh rate (120Hz on my monitor), which is very comfortable to the eyes.

I don't know anything about WinDVD, as I am a content user of PowerDVD XP.
In PowerDVD XP, there is no deblocking (it's even a first for me to hear that WinDVD has deblocking anyway). You get the sharpest picture if you use force Weave. Enabling Bob will introduce jaggies if you use hardware acceleration, or blends and/or blurring if you don't use hardware acceleration.

[trodas]

The ugly 640x480 is, when you have sharp enought monitor to watch more from about 35-50cm that 2m... :rolleyes:
Then things suxx...

About the deblocking - as it does take place into every decoding DivX and Xvids and such, my fear is, that happens with mpg2 too...
Look, when i see DivX video with disabled deblocking at ALL, its unbeliable sharp, NICE and - thats the most important thing ever - CANT, just CANT be resized. You immediatelly starting to notive very ugly resize and very unplaesant jagged edges.

Since nothing like that i can see on DVD, my fear is, that it just MUST be deblocked too, therefore i worry.
(OTOH, i want disable that, cause then the image quality can be much higger!!!)

[Jafco]

Maybe I'm missing something, but couldn't you prevent scaling issues with 1280x960 resolution? (640 x2 by 480 x2)? That would be great, for original 640/480 material. However, for 720/480 material, there's no analogous 1440/960 resolution.

[midiguy]

what does "OTOH" stand for?

[sillKotscha]

I guess 'On The Other Hand'...

[((( atom )))]

if you are thet puristical and willing to try some settings in order to get good results, maybe you should stop using windows and give movix a try.

movix is cool! dead cool!

it is a linux-distribution using mplayer wich instantly boots from a disc - can be even the disc containing the movie since it is 5mb - and plays your movie using either pure vesa 2.0-output or the framebuffer. doublescanning and all np and it is almost totally hardware-independent, sice it uses vesa to talk to the graphiccards and doesn't use any drivers. playback is based on ffdshow and you can turn off any postfiltering. what will be of importance for you is that you get it to use a 640 res, so no rescaling will take place.

there is also a biger version with a user-interface - little more convenient - wich makes use of some drivers but can also use vesa and framebuffer-output.

just check it out, it is well worth it, also mplayer is far more powerfull than any player you can find for windows, believe me.. it can reconstruct missing index-blocks on the fly, it syncs _every_ movie, if set up right it searches key-frame-based only and so on.

it might take some time, till you got it to work , depending yon your hardware and your understanding of the surrounding os. in case you don't mange or don'tr understand something, let me know, i will try and help..

regards...