Question on watching movies in high-def.

[dimtim]

Hey guys I have all of my dvds currently ripped to my PC and encoded to xvid. Well I just got a new lcd tv which does 1080p so naturally I would like to be watching my dvds at the highest quality level. Unfortunately the xvids outputted over hdmi to my new tv don't look that good so I was wondering, if I wanted to re-rip my dvds to my PC and have them look good over the hdmi output, what is the lowest size/format I could encode them to? I know "looks good" is subjective, but basically dvd quality. If I kept them in mpeg2, could I still shrink the file-size over the original dvd size? Are there any guides for that? Basically, I want to be able to rip a dvd and play it over the hdmi up-converting it to 1920 by 1080 and look similar to regular upconverted dvd players playing the actual dvd.

Thanks
Tim

[Baldrick]

Get a bigger HDD so you don't have to shrink them.


But if you want to shrink them,
What xvid settings did you use for your current avi xvids? What resolution and video bitrate?

You may get a bit better quality if you use H264 and highest possible resolution(like 720x406 for 16:9) but it's probably not worth it to reconvert all DVDs...

[dimtim]

Haha well it is for a few of them. I actually have a few videos encoded in that I believe (they say x264) in the file name so I'm guessing that's it and they look ridiculously nice on my tv so it would be totally worth it for me.

[jagabo]

Leave the resolution at 720x480 or 720x576 and use the Xvid/x264 DAR flags to set the playback aspect ratio. Use Target Quantizer (Xvid) or CQP or CRF (x264) encoding with high quality settings to retain picture quality.

Or, as Baldrick suggested, re-rip them as ISO images and use a player that can play ISO images (MPCHC, KMPlayer, VLC). You'll get no loss of quality.

[MysticE]

Hey guys I have all of my dvds currently ripped to my PC and encoded to xvid. Well I just got a new lcd tv which does 1080p so naturally I would like to be watching my dvds at the highest quality level. Unfortunately the xvids outputted over hdmi to my new tv don't look that good so I was wondering, if I wanted to re-rip my dvds to my PC and have them look good over the hdmi output, what is the lowest size/format I could encode them to?
Thanks
Tim

You didn't mention the size of your Xvids. In general if you stick to about half the size of your original, 4GB DVD movie becomes 2GB Xvid, they should be nearly identical.

[tweedledee]

I watch dvd movies that I play on an upscaling player. The picture and sound is great.

[Nelson37]

Staying with MPG2, only minimal shrinkage is available without significant quality loss.

Xvid, about one-half the size, as mentioned.

X264, one-quarter the size or even less.

The x264 vids you already have, were presumably done by someone else, from an unknown source. Be aware that many, but by no means all, h264 encodes are done from an HD source. The perceived higher quality has nothing to do with the codec, but the source.

Upconverting on the PC involves a lot of variables ending with no stock answer. Display device also affects this. Basically I would advise to not resize downward at any time. H264 involves a lot of encoding time and high hardware demands for playback, but if you have the horsepower it's well worth it.

[dimtim]

Awesome, yeah with the dvds I have encoded now I resized them a lot, and I think that effected them a lot. Should I resize them larger when I encode them or not? Like should I resize it to 1080 resolution when I encode it, or let the player do it?

Thanks
Tim

[redwudz]

You might try ripping one of your higher quality DVDs, then extracting a 5 - 10 minute representative clip. Then try a few different formats and settings. Shouldn't take long to encode a small clip.

For Xvids, I usually go with 1 - 2 GB filesize. With X.264, 1GB. But you need to find what pleases you.

[jagabo]

I think Nelson37 is being a little over optomistic when saying x264 can compress DVD down to 1/4 or less the size. I'd put it closer to 1/3. The problem with putting a number on this is that x264 degrades differently than Xvid. Xvid breaks up into blocky artifacts as the compression gets too extreme. x264 uses strong deblocking filters on playback so it gets smeary or oily looking instead. Note that Xvid has an optional playback deblocking filter you can enable. But it doesn't work as well as x264's. And you may not have that option with a set-top Divx/DVD player.

I wouldn't recommend upscaling before encoding. A larger frame will require more bitrate. You're likely to find that a 1920x1080 x264 encoding will require more bitrate than the original 720x480 MPG source. Your player may do just as good a job of upscaling anyway. And most set-top Divx/DVD palyers will not play HD files.

I would do as redwudz suggests: run some experiments yourself to see what is tolerable to you.