How to watch burned movies on TV with good quality?

[Pfhor]

Hi,

First of, I am new here so sorry in advance if this question has been asked a million times.

I have avi formatted movies which I have been converting to dvds to play them on a TV. I use toast to burn the videos. Some movies come out okay to good quality, but other movies have areas cropped out, are very pixeled, blurry, and just plain ugly. I always burn using the best quality slider. What can I do to get better quality burns? I know with compressing you lose quality, but sometimes they are just too unbearable to watch.

One other question which may relate to my first question. I've read about dvd players which support divx and xvid movies. Since you burn these movies straight to a cd without any compression, wouldn't that mean when you play the cd on a TV, it would look near perfect? If so, I am just going to look for a cheap divx/xvid dvd player. Could anyone recommend a few?

Thanks in advance.

[Herve]

hello

I have avi formatted movies [...] I use toast t [...] very pixeled, blurry, and just plain ugly.

Are you sure that your avi are perfect?
You will better see all the avi defaults on tv instead of monitor…
And usually avi have a small size/resolution (smaller than DVD-VIDEO), so the DVD have to increase its resolution (no gain, just more visible defaults)

dvd players which support divx and xvid movies. [...] when you play the cd on a TV, it would look near perfect?

Not perfect, but exactly your avi (you just avoid a transcoding)

[guns1inger]

Where to start ?

Assuming these are typical 700MB - 1.4GB AVI files encoded with Xvid/Divx, you aren't going to get much. These videos are already heavily compressed. They are blocky in dark or flat areas, and anywhere that there is a lot of movement. They are soft, and possibly have jaggies from the resizing. Most have mosquito noise around edges. Most are substantially resized down from the original resolution.

Some of these issues are not obvious on a computer monitor. The gamma values are darker than most TVs (assuming you haven't calibrated your PC monitor to your TV).

However, when you convert these files back to DVD, you have to undo some of these issues. First thing that usually happens is to resize back to DVD resolution. This makes any blocky artifacts larger and more obvious. The process of re-encoding is impacted by the noise introduced by the original encode - the blocks, the mosquito noise etc. This increases the noise in the new version, and uses up bitrate. Resizing also makes any jaggies worse, and softens the image further. And this assumes a good quality encoder. With an average encoder, it is worse again.

And then you watch it back on your TV. Anything that was previously hidden on your monitor is now out there for you to see, and made worse by the re-encode.

On a Windows box (or linux box running wine) you might be able to improve some of these issues with Avisynth filters, but it will be a moderate improvement at best.

Using a player cable of Divx/Xvid playabck removes the need to re-encode, but the quality of playback won't be any better than the original file, and you will still see a lot of issues that are not so obvious on the monitor. And if you have a large screen TV, chances are the video will look very average as the cheap upscalers won't do you any favors.

Bottom line - you get what you pay for. You download lower quality files, that is what you get.

[basie1955]

I have also burned many 700 MB files encoded with Xvid/Divx. My question is: My old JVC player played these
very well with very little distortion. It just died. I bought an interim Sony DVD player and everything looks horrible.
Jagged lines and sometimes i t seems like I'm looking at the movie thorough a faint glass block window.
I tried changing the settings on the player from interlaced to progressive with no results. Just don't get why
the JVC rendered these movies so well.

thanks if anybody has an answer.....

[zapatasghost]

try one of these:

http://www.awindinc.com/McTiVia/

Streams direct from mac to tv. Cut out the burn-to-DVD middleman...

[basie1955]

Thanks....