What encoders do commerical DVD companies use?

[richy]

This might be in the wrong section but what the heck!

After doing tons and tons of encoding tests and eventually seeing artifacts everywhere even in everyday life(!) I decided to give myself a break and rented 2 DVDs from Blockbuster because I had a coupon. I got The Family Man and Being John Malkovich. Since my brain is all wired-up for looking out for any dodgy encoding I was able to spot a real difference in the encoding quality between the 2 titles.

The Family Man seemed to have a lot of artifacting going on and when there were dissolves from light to dark there were some really obvious blocky parts and some not-quite-black-screens happening where dark grey blocks were just hanging around instead of going entirely black.

Being John Malkovich, however, seemed to have a far superior picture with none of the problems I'd spotted in The Family Man; dissolves seemed to be grainy (if anything) rather than blocky and to my mind it was like comparing encoding jobs from TMPGEnc and CCE. OK, so the average bitrates were different between the 2 movies (7.8Mb/sec for John Malkovich & 5.5Mb/s for Family Man) but it was the way the encoder had produced the picture that was the most obvious difference.

Before I go on and on and on forever and ever I was wondering if anyone knows what encoders various companies use when producing their DVDs because before now I can't say that I've really seen much difference but Entertainment in Video (The Family Man) and Universal (Being John Malkovich) can't be using the same one to my mind. I always just assumed that there were only about 2 different hardware solutions out there but if someone told me EiV were using TMPGEnc I honestly wouldn't be surprised! I don't want to start another CCE vs TMPEnc debate but using lower bitrates as I do normally, I find CCE produces smoother looking flat areas whereas TMPGEnc can produce areas which are blocky in comparison. This is the same sort of difference I'm on about here with things like walls in Nic Cage's house, for example, being blocky in places and shadows looking cacky etc.

I'll shut up now and hope that someone answers

[aldus4]

If you check various search engines regarding mpeg2 encoders you can find a various list of commercial hard- and software encoders. I presume as they cost + US$ 10.000 that they are the ones that commercial companies use. I doubt if you actually contacted the film companies or distributors that you would find out what they use, but they all seem to use different methods. Good luck in your search...

[aldus4]

If you check various search engines regarding mpeg2 encoders you can find a various list of commercial hard- and software encoders. I presume as they cost + US$ 10.000 that they are the ones that commercial companies use. I doubt if you actually contacted the film companies or distributors that you would find out what they use, but they all seem to use different methods. Good luck in your search...

[Greg12]

Good luck. I think commerical encoders have CSS in them.

[patrickm]

isn't CSS added at the authoring stage?