Getting Blocky on my blacks

[darkufo]

Done a few TMPGENC encodes at 7000 CBR, but on my blacks, they are a little blocky on playback on my DVD player.

Any tips / advice as to how best reduce / remove blockiness from a TMPGENC encode ?

Encode time is not an issue.

Cheers in advance Andy

[Thorn]

The source material might be bad... filters are good, but if the black is from letterboxing the best thing to do is either crop then re-letterbox, or just cover the black parts with pure black (tmpgenc does this by itself). If it's just dark noise when between scenes or in dark spots then temporal/coring/levels filters might be appropriate. I'm not really the expert on that so maybe someone else can explain better.

Also, if the playback is ok on the computer but not the dvd player it could mean your DVD player has a cheap decoder chip.

[darkufo]

Thanks for the info. So TMPGENC can actaully fix some of these with the approaiate settings.

On my PC it all looks ok, and the DVD Player is a pretty decent one Yamaha S520 which for commerical disks is excellent quality.

My source footage is a 640*480 AVI and I'm using it in Premire at 720*576 and encodign to MPEG2

[DJRumpy]

Sounds like the luminance range is wrong. A TV can only produce around 220 shades of gray (15-235) on a gray scale. The PC can produce 255 (0-255). The TV can't produce those shades of gray below 15, and so you get 15's for anything between 1-14, making a kind of sparkle or macroblock effect (the same affect also gives you those overly bright, washed out appearance on the other end of the scale).

The problem I'm describing will usually only show up on very dark areas.
Pardon my crude asci representation, but I hope you get the idea. It's supposed to be a gray scale.

Source Material:
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 --- 229 230 231 232 233 234 235

Moved to PC:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 --- 233 234 235 236 --- 255

Moved back to TV
15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 15 16 17 --- 233 234 235 235 235 235

or yours may be easier to see like this:
15 16 17 18 19 20 ---- 231 232 233 234 235

This is just a possibility, as I don't know your specifics.
In the last instance, the luminance would have bumped those dark area up enough in the scale so they become visible (dark gray), rather than black

You didn't say what your source was, so it's difficult so suggest a fix. Most programs will give you the option to retain the TV scale, rather than converting to PC scale.