xvid looks ugly in dark scenes (due to fault in source)

[cAEd]

hello,

I am writing to ask for some help backing up my PAL Donnie Darko DVD to xvid (1CD). I have tried lots of settings and filters and generally the picture looks perfect, the problem appears with dark scenes, especially the opening scene where the floor is dark but viewable and is and quite noisy and comes out quite blocky and nasty!

I think the underlying problem is that the source is dark, I guess its supposed to be, but xvid just doesn’t like it (I tried it with divx and got the similar results).

I know xvid has difficulties with very dark areas (as in the xvid faq), and I would like to lighten up the video a bit, I have tried doing this with the levels command in avisynth, but this seems to amplify the problem.

I wouldn’t have much of a problem if I were playing back the file on my pc I could use ffdshow or something, but I want to view it on my liteon lvd-2001.

I want a 1cd rip and I am currently using the XviD-1.0-Beta2-05122003.

Can someone please shed some light on this for me? maybe I should manually adjust more weight in the bit rate to the zones where I am having trouble or is there an simpler solution?

TIA, cAEd :]

[Malevolent]

Howbout' using ApplyRange & some spatial and/or temporal filtering accompanied with tweak in Avisynth?

Don't know any XviD "magic trick" that would solve it. (doesn't mean there isn't one ;))

[cipher]

hmmm...insanely increasing bitrate is always the "magic trick" :D
Well, as an attemp to do that, using Mpeg instead of h263 as the type of quantization might help a little, and using a custom matrix which preserves more might help more.
;)

[Prettz]

Have you tried LumaFilter (from MPEG2Dec3) or ColorYUV? Brightening a DVD source using DVD2AVI's Gain and Offset functions (which I think does the same thing as ColorYUV) has always given me the best results. I've never used them on specific scenes, though. I've only applied them to the whole movie.

I don't know if it would be best to apply softening or denoising filters in the dark scenes; in fact, I always apply much less filtering in dark scenes to keep xvid from smothering everything with blocks. If the whole scene is very dark AND you have extreme amounts of noise over part of the scene, I don't think there's going to be much you can do abount it.

Using denoising filters to make the noisy floor stand still might work. If it doesn't I might suggest giving that scene a much higher bitrate to at least try to make the noise less ugly.