DVD/SVCD poor quality ???

[bill2]

Hi mates

I wonder what causes the huge difference in quality between DVD players?

I made an MPEG-2 home movie (using MSPro 6 Ligos codec) and burn it as an SVCD (using my LG x12x8x32) file features are: 480x576, 2452 Kbps, 44100 16 bit 192Kbps.

While playing it from my computer (using WinDVD 3) via ATI AIW 7500 on a TV screen it looks very nice, fair quality.

However, I have tried to play it with three different DVD players (LG, Pioneer, Dawhoo) which are obviously not the top of the range and the quality was unecceptable.

Is there anything I should change in the file properties?
What could be the reason for this poor quality of the players? (BTW, Blockbuster's DVDs played perfect in these players)

Thanks

[Sciascia]

Well for one thing the LIGOS encoder is pretty poor. Not to be rude but it isn't very good. TMPGEnc is a much better encoder. CCE is of course a lot better but a lot more expensive. The new Ulead encoder (coming in MSP7 and available in VS6) is suposed to be really good. Haven't really seen it so I can't comment about it very much.

The ATI card should have better looking playback since it has about 1.5G of CPU power behind it to make it look nicer and the ATI SW uses some form of adaptive deinterlacing or something. It has something that really makes it look better than it actually is. The standalone players are a lot more restricted on what they can do for image processing. Generally there isn't a lot needed for DVD's, they tend to be pretty clean .

[Brian Ellis]

Bill

It would be normal that you wouldn't get the same quality between a DVD and an SVCD, as the latter is recorded at 480 pixels wide or 240 equivalent lines horizontal. Most TVs will resolve a very poor 320-350 equivalent lines, so a 704 pixel wide DVD will be resolved almost fully. Then there is the DVD player itself which will be optimised for 704 line work. Remember also that a TV is an analogue device with no memory: it works in real time. A graphics card, with umpteen Mb of memory and a processor, can optimise a frame of data before it's displayed, with intelligent interpolation. A TV can't. My guess is that an SVCD will never be as good on a TV as you may think, only marginally better than VHS.

[dchip]

Originally posted by Sciascia
Well for one thing the LIGOS encoder is pretty poor. Not to be rude but it isn't very good.

I never know what to expect from the LIGOS encoder. I recently fed an excellent-quality DV-AVI from a Vegas Video 3.0 edit into Dazzle DVD Complete and let the built-in LIGOS encoder make the MPEG-2, then authored in DVD Complete and burned the DVD with my Pioneer DVR-104. The result: The most perfect video I have ever put on any disc. Played it on Pioneer DV-333 set top and I was astounded at the quality. It looked so much like what I actually shot on Mini DV that I could barely tell the difference. So this encounter with Ligos has been a happy one for me. Not sure what makes it integrate so well with Dazzle DVD Complete but I love the quality.

[Indiana]

I can confirm that fact that those video materials DO look better on a Radeon7500/8500 card than on DVD players (even an Onkyo one).
They look better than when played on NVidia cards as well - I have noticed this several times when I came up with my DivX encoded movies that I thought were looking great and when I played them back on a friends GeForce they looked worse and ocassionally had a slight, barely noticeable stuttering that was just not present on the ATI.
Last time I directly compared the video on my Notebook with a RadeonMobility to his Notebook playing the exact same Movie on the GeForce2go and the superiority of the Radeons playback was clearly visible.

[Reggie]

Note: Ligos

Personally I have encoded the same clip with both tmpgenc and ligos (both premiere and standalone)

720x576 huffyuv Interlaced ->, Variable bitrate 6500 max 7800, interlaced with maximum motion vector search and played both clips back on tv. I see no differences except that ligos standalone encoder is a little better than premiere plugins since the standalone uses 10 bit something while premiere 9.

I also tested picvideo and huffyuv -> ligos. While I could not
detect any quality improvments from quality settings 19 and 20 in picvideo, it was possible to see differences between picvideo (20) and Huffyuv. Huffyuv was the best.


However, for svcd low bitrates ligos creates nothing but crap.
I have not tested tmpgenc for this purpose since I feel dvd is the only way to go.

When it comes to mpeg 1, panasonic plugins are perhaps the best.

Have not tested cce

Regards


Reggie