Enhancing DIVx AVI

[moviebuff2]

Hi,

I have a video clip of a trip (about 25 minutes) which is in DivX AVI. The clip can be watched fine on my PC monitor. However, when watched it on a TV via my Philips DVP642, the picture is not as crisp as it was on my monitor. Is there any way I can enhance it, like transcoding it to an MP4 file?

Thanks

[greymalkin]

hmmm..usually it's the other way around...how big is your monitor and how big and what kind of tv do you have?

you really aren't going to be able to increase the quality of the video..tinkering with it will only make it worse.

[moviebuff2]

Hi greymalkin,

My PC monitor is a 17-inch NEC. My TV is actually a TV monitor, 20 inches, also made by NEC.

Please note that the AVI file I have is not a pure AVI, it's a DivX AVI. My family wanted to reduce the size of the file so that they may send it on the Internet fast.

One of the very noticeable degraded quality is the black. On my PC monitor, the black areas appear a solid black. On my TV monitor, they appear as if they were made up by numerous black blocks.

[guns1inger]

I would suggest that the difference, especially in the blacks, is simply a matter of calibration. Your monitor is running darker/higher contrast than your TV, reducing your ability to differentiate between near tones in the dark areas. This is why the colour appears solid on the monitor. Thurn the brightness up and you will see the same effects as you are seeing on your TV. The is almost nothing you can do to stop this, as it is a function of lossy compression as too low a bitrate. You might be able to smooth some of this out using filters in virtualdub or avisynth, but this will coem at a cost - potentially lowered detail levels and you will have to re-encode the video, risking reducing quality.

Basically, if you squeeze it too tight, you throw away details that you can't get back. Tweak the settings of your TV to match your monitor. It won't change the video, but at least it will look the same on both. Use the THX optimiser that comes on some DVDs.

[moviebuff2]

Thanks.

I think I will just have to watch it on my 17-inch PC monitor. Hopefully, some day I will be able to afford a bigger and better PC monitor.

[greymalkin]

if you can get ahold of the uncompressed version and make a dvd of it that would be better than the shrunk divx file. The banding you are seeing could also be a result of too few colors being displayed. Are you connecting the computer to the 20"? If so it might detect it as a secondary monitor and automatically set the colors to 256 color or 16 bit when it should be set to 24-32 bit. just a thought...