Is there really any need to crop away the mattes?

[Mole]

Owen, why would it matter if it's hardware or software, as long as you get the quality.

Or you could capture at as huffyuv, then compress using CCE or TMPGEnc as MPEG2 at maybe 10 000 bitrate. I can almost tell you there will be nearly no difference between the original broadcast and your copy and much more details than with de-interlace MPEG4. Of course, this would require an insanly large disk space and more time.

But you said you'd rather do a real-time capture. So, you yourself are sacrificing some quality in order to save time. Hm, not so mr perfect quality like you implied in your first post in here after all, eh?

In the end, it's up to each individual to make the choice just how much quality you are willing to sacrifice.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hello Insolit, and welcome to the forum.

In answer to your question: -

One question, I've read that to watch your 16:9 TV movies in your pc, you just resize them to 16:9 using the divx player.

I do get the exact aspect ratio. This is because I don't crop away the mattes for either 2.35:1 or 1.85:1 source material.

True black (matte) is an easy colour (or tone) to encode and does not effect the finished encoded file size too much.

What's more difficult to encode however, is the edge between the matte and the image. If this edge is not very good, the codec will have to work quite hard to make sense of it. And to many people this is an unnecessary exercise.

For anyone out there who's not sure weather or not their encodes are the correct aspect ratio, you can try this old 'video assit' trick.

Spin a 1.35:1 DVD in your PC's DVD drive. Then when you have the image on screen, turn up your software players contrast level. If you are using a 4:3 PC monitor you should see two sets of horizontal black bands above and below the image. The slightly lighter band immediately above and below the image is the 'matte'.

Now, if you mark these band positions (on the inside edge of your monitor), with a nice sharp pencil you will know where the true 1.77:1 (16:9) and 2.35:1 aspect ratio cut off points are.

OK, but here's the thing. If you then spin a 1.85:1 DVD and perform the same proceedure, you could find that 'matte' is not true to centre (You may even notice vertical bands to the left and right of the image). This is a big problem with 1.85:1 DVD's, especially the early ones. I went thru' about 30No 1.85:1 DVD's before I found one that was aligned correctly, which just happened to be 'Something About Mary'.

So after you've generated your encodes you can now, very easily check the aspect ratio of the output image against your little monitor marks!

Hope this helps some people!

[Insolit]

Thanks for the advice, I've already done something similar.
Now I crop and resize movies as usual to the 16:9 PC aspect ratio, cause I also like to share my movies with other people.
I found that the black colour didn't use much bitrate, due to the encoding of some movies. One good example is the movie "The Others", because the scenarios are most of the times pretty dark, I can't get a bitrate superior to 1320 kbps. I believe I can say I've reach the maximum quality of the codec to this movie.

[Mole]

When it is a known fact that cropping out the mattes will always benefit compression and improve quality under any circumstances.

Even just cropping it out and no resize.

Even if the improvement may almost be not noticeable, it will still always benefit.

The question would be why not do it?

[Selur]

@mole: that's the way I see it too ;)

@Insolit: try Xvid and a more quality aiming (custom) matrix and your bitrate and quality, can get far beyond your current encode with 1320 kbps.

Cu Selur

[SeeMoreDigital]

Well, one of the main problems I have by 'cropping away the mattes' is that my Xcard will not playback my encodes at the correct aspect ratio on my 16:9 TV!

I don't know if this can be overcome when using other hardware based decoders, such as the Kiss 450/500.

[Mole]

That is one of the reasons why most people resize movies to 1:1 aspect ratio.

[SeeMoreDigital]

All my encodes are at 1:1 ratio.

It's just that the Xcard can not correctly display a 720w x 432h (or thereabouts) cropped image correctly.

For some reason the Xcard likes to stretch 432 vertical pixels to 576 vertical pixels.

Strange but true!

[Insolit]

SeeMoreDigital when you maintain the native resolution of the DVD, using the 1:1, if you want to see the movies with the correct aspect ratio on your TV (considering it's 16:9), you must set the player you're using to 16:9.
This way you'll get perfect aspect ratio, this is the way i do things.
By the way, now with the container matroska, i will encode my movies once again using the nativ anamorphic aspect ratio :)
Check out this container, it's simply great.
And a great new i got was that i could put the pc to do the the automatic resizing of anamorphic movies to the 16:9 PC DAR.
To do that just have to get the latest ffdshow and activate the "overlay mixer" in the codecs section. This works great for me.
We can also do the automatic resizing by using the latest core player and the latest version of the CDL plugin, which is 1.2.
If you need any links just ask!
Cya!

[SeeMoreDigital]

Insolit

Thanks for your post. As it happens I do set my software player, especially the DivX player 2.1 to 16:9.

With regard to matroska I started experimenting with this container when I first became aware of it (couple of months ago). But I must admit I have'nt fiddled with it in recent weeks. Although I have kept up by reading the posts.

There's no doubt that containers such as matroska present a very interesting insight as to how all types of media could be stored. I would love to think that my Xcard could be upgraded to recognize .mkv!

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital I would love to think that my Xcard could be upgraded to recognize .mkv!

Thats is not very likely to happen, and also not necessary. In matroska's 'native MPEG4 mode' we store the MPEG4 Elementary Stream unchanged in the MKV file, and it should be easy to adapt the driver software or DirectShow renderer filter for your X-card such that these native MPEG4ES streams can be feed to your X-card, just like if they would be coming from an MP4 file ....

The only reason why all matroska files currently are VfW/AVI compatibility files ( and even then it should be playable with X-card, as i seem to remember its playing AVI fine also ) is due to the fact that we cant playback our native files on DirectShow yet, as milan had no time to adapt ffdshow to understand our own MEDIATYPE and timestamp order ... but DaveEL made a nice workaround now, with a small 'timestamp manager' filter, linking between the matroska parser filter and ffdshow/xvid.ax/divdec.ax ;) ..... to be released soon :) ...