Filters.

[ToiletDuck]

Do all of you play your rips with filters? i've been judging my quality by how good mine looks after I rip it with no filters. Won't filters take away quality? Or do they just require more CPU? What are filters that most people use? Do you ahve to do a lot of tweeking with each movie and stuff. I want to rip them and forget them :) Just click and go. None of the hassle of jacking around once done.

[killingspree]

well i for myself am not using any filters for playback. i do use postprocessing from ffdshow /divx... for my standards that is enough. sometimes if watch a badly encoded movie (for example one of my first ones i still did with flask not knowing sh** about bitrate calculations) i try lingering around with some smoothing filters to get rid of some blocks but most of the time i end up just watching the movie as is not wanting to spend half an hour for tweaking the filters.

oh and you can't say filters take away quality. some filters, especially smoothing ones try to get rid of blocks and this goes at the cost of some detail...
well and they do require CPU of course...

I want to rip them and forget them
well same here... that's why i am still sticking with avi... so when going to a friends house to watch a movie i don't have to worry which codecs i have to take along in case he doesn't have ogm installed (just an example of course)

regards
steVe

[BoNz1]

Well, I always use ffdshow to playback my movies. Generally, I use no post-processing since I don't like how it smooths the picture but if the movie was encoded poorly it helps a little. I find using ffdshow and unsharpen mask set at very low parameters and adding some noise looks the best when watching most of my movies. But of course, every movie will be a little different, I like to tweak these things a little as I am playing them back, in ffdshow you can save your settings under image settings so I can save all my settings as I like and then load them up for each movie. I really like this. As for getting rid of blocks some sort of postprocessing is your best bet. I have tried using things like asharp in ffdshow to help get rid of them but it doesn't seem to help that much if the blocking is really bad. There is also a blur and noise reduction in ffdshow which may also help as well. Apart from that, I am not sure what else you could do.

[rmatei]

I assume you're using ffdshow, since it's much more flexible than the default divx/xvid filters.

I've found that if you encoded a movie properly, and blocks aren't a problem, postprocessing (deblocking/deringing) is not a good idea. It gives the picture a pretty artificial look, but that's just IMHO. If a movie is really bad, then it helps, but I don't have any of those ;)

I don't like the unsharp mask either. It's just glorified edge enhancement, and it makes the macroblocks more obvious. However, I love the noise feature. Use it at a low setting (~10) and it's barely noticeable as noise, but it does make the picture more pleasant. By adding some high frequency information, the picture seems sharper, more natural, and grainy like real film.