"Dancing Frames" with playback on TV

[iparout]

Hi all.

After playing back my DivX 5 Pro movies on TV using my Marvel's G450eTV TV-out, I can see that some areas of the picture have what I call "Dancing Frames" i.e. they look like they are moving\floating... This happens especially with the dark colors of the picture (i.e. black walls e.t.c). They same kind of movement is notised also on the PC monitor but on a very less quantity.

I thought that it had something to do with low bitrate of the movie, however I noticed that the same thing happens with movies that are encoded ~20 MB undersized, which are supposed to have maxed out the codecs ability.

So now I am wondering if this "Dancing Frames" effect is something normal when playing back DivX 5 movies.

It's not a very disturbing effect but it is still noticable and I am wondering if I should live with it or whether there's something to do about it.

Thanks in advance.

[OvERaCiD23]

From what I've read about this issue, it's an internal issue with the codec (possibly MPEG4 altogether, because XviD users complain of it as well). The best solution I found was to use ffdshow for playback, and in "Picture Properties", turn the "Luminance Gain" down to ~110 (from 128). This cleans up most of the color variation. Also, if you can, use S-Video instead of RCA to transfer the video. This helped out a bit on my TV as well.

[iparout]

Looks like I will have to live with it, after all... That's too bad cause, although it isn't *THAT* disturbing, it's a real pain.

Please, if anyone else knows anything about it, post here.

Also some links to any referance of the same problem would be nice too.

P.S. : Could this be because of using B-Frames or GMC ? I use both and I don't have the time to re-encode the movie without them to see if it helps to solve the problem.

[DJ Bobo]

@ iparout
GMC has to be disabled anyway. It has been proven that it causes artifacts. Search the DivX5 forum for it.

Bidirectional encoding is OK unless you're looking for perfect quality. I've done 2 100% quality based tests, one normal and one with b.e. The first one has no "dancing", the second one has some.

But IMHO this is no reason to disable b.e. unless you're encoding 100% quality based and don't care about size.

[iparout]

Well, as for GMC, I searched the forum and watched the artifacts that it causes. They have nothing to do with my "Dancing Frames" problem so i think that even if I disable GMC, I won't see any improvement with the "Dancing Frames", right ?

Furthermore, the GMC artifacts (which I have never experienced myself) seem to be a bug of the DivX decoder and not a fault in the original file so when the next version of the decoder is releashed, the bug should be fixed... I hope ;)

[iparout]

So anyways, hasn't anyone here managed to solve the "Dancing Frames" effect ? (or make it less noticable ?)

[midiguy]

which decoder are you using? I was using ffdshow with it post-processing ON and it made this jumoing kind of effect.. I tured the post-processing off in ffdshow and the bug disappears.. so, if that helps any... I think they are fixing that bug anyways... sorry about my non-sensical rambling.. it is 4:21 am, and I can't think or see straight.