Question about Packed Bitstream

[GangstaRap]

I hope this is the place - anyway:

I have Pioneer DV-383 (DVD Player), and it doesnt support Packed Bitstream, so i'v been told to use MPEG4Modifier to unpack the bitstream.
and i have a few questions:

what is Packed Bitstream????
does unpacking the bitstream will reduce the video quality?

thank you!!!

[guns1inger]

My understanding is that it is a compromise method of storing the data to make playback using vfw based players work correctly. Unpacking it does not affect image quality.

[jagabo]

Unpacking a packed bitstream has no effect on quality. It's just a matter of how the frames are packed inside the AVI file.

MPEG video constists if key frames (full pictures, I frames), forward predicted frames (encoding only the differnces between a frame and an earlier frame, P frames), and backward predicted frames (B frames). B frames can't be reconstructed until a later frame has been decoded. Some programs (mostly those based on the VFW system of Windows) can't handle this out-of-sequence decoding scheme. Packed bitstream is a workaround for this.

[GangstaRap]

guns1inger, jagabo,

thanks for your help guys!!!