Xvid and color shift

[zodiac-]

Has this been discussed? What is going on with the weird color shift: blue lips, orange sky etc with Xvid codec? These encodes play fine on the computer but on the Philips 642 the color is all out of wack. I use autoGK with the latest codecs, what’s odd is it seems to be unpredictable and intermittent: using all the same settings, one time it will be fine the next not. I wasn’t able to find a discussion in the archives. Thank you

[Ai Haibara]

Yes, it's been discussed. I think one 'solution' (aside from reencoding your AVIs to meet the specifics of what the 642 is looking for) is to press the System Menu button twice while watching the video.

[zodiac-]

iI should have explained it better: often times there is a (how to explain it?) melted plastic, vibrant supersaturated all fuzzy almost unwatchable distortion and pushing the system button twice restores it to normal, in this case you have a almost normal picture, full sharpness but the hues are all off, most noticeably blue lips, the system button fix has no effect. What specifics is the 642 looking for?
Thank You

[Ai Haibara]

I think the manual mentions some of the specifics (but I've never read the manual ). A link that's also been referred to on these forums that might help is http://www.jarnot.com/twiki/bin/view/Public/DVP642LisaBsAVIGuide .

[zodiac-]

Thank you for your responses, are you referring to the Philips manual? It seemed very brief and I hadn't thought of checking there, not even sure if i still have it. I have looked at that LisaB guide and it doesn't seem to address this specific problem. As i mentioned it is sporadic: I'd say 1 out of 4 encodes and I do it each time the same way...

[jagabo]

Don't use custom matrices. Don't encode with a frame size over 720 wide or 576 tall. Don't encode at too high a bitrate. Don't use B-VOPs. Don't use GMC or QPEL. Works every time for me.

[Ai Haibara]

jagabo beat me to the reply. ^_^ I thought I recalled seeing someone posting on these forums once that the color shifts are due primarily to the use of custom matrices, but I couldn't find it in a quick search... and it's a good idea to do as jagabo said, anyway.

I'll have to admit I haven't experienced the color shifts on my 642, though... I've only had AVIs either play, or not (or barely play, if the 642 doesn't like them).

Yes, I was referring to the 642's manual.

[jagabo]

Acutally B-VOP's are OK on the DVP-642 but some other players have problems with them. And I usually use single pass, target quantizer mode where B-VOP's are encoded at lower quality -- so I don't use them.

Oh, one other thing: be sure to finalize your disks. It's best to avoid multisession completely.