52" LCD Xvid looks bad.

[David97]

I keep my movies on a hard drive as back ups but since i got a PS3 and can stream the movies to my TV i have been using it only thing is that you can not stream a .iso so they have to be converted to xvid/divx when doing so i have been using these specs.

720 x 400 29.97fps 2994Kbps
audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz stereo 128Kbps

they still look bad on a 52" TV

any suggestions? I'm not tyring to save space or anything i only convert the movies so they can be streamed.

[GMaq]

Hi,
Welcome to HDTV, I was in the same boat, 3ivX,XviD,DivX all look pretty horrible at that kind of resolution. The best and easiest thing to do is to switch from XviD to H.264, I back movies up to H.264 for my HTPC at bitrates that are about half of what I used with the other MPEG-4 codecs and the quality is visually about 90% as good as the DVD source. H.264 will supposedly stream well with PS3's, I use WinFF to convert but there are also about half a dozen other really good apps on this site as well.

Check out this thread: http://biggmatt.com/winff-forums/index.php?topic=48.0

[David97]

Why will H.264 look better than xvid?

But anyway i will give it a try

[jman98]

Your TV is gigantic. Unless you're sitting something like 15 feet from it, it's going to greatly magnify all the flaws in Xvid. I have a 40" LCD HDTV and I sit about 9 feet from it. Xvid/Divx looks a lot better on a smaller TV than yours at a reasonable viewing distance. Heck, at 52" you can probably see all the flaws in DVD too, you just don't see notice them as easily.

H.264 is a more advanced codec than Xvid. It can provide superior quality at lower bit rates than Xvid. Remember that you are converting one lossy format (DVD) to another (Xvid or H.264) so you should reasonably expect some quality loss. The only way to not lose quality at all is to not convert at all. Your Xvid settings for video are quite generous, but I would argue that your audio settings are too low. Your audio settings have nothing to do with video quality though.

[GMaq]

Well......

If you're looking for a really technical answer then here's the glossary definition:

Xvid and Other MPEG-4 Codecs
An ISO/IEC standard 14496 developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the committee that also developed MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. These standards made interactive video on CD-ROM, DVD and Digital Television possible. MPEG-4 is the result of another international effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers from all over the world. MPEG-4 was finalized in October 1998 and became an International Standard in 1999. The fully backward compatible extensions under the title of MPEG-4 Version 2 were frozen at the end of 1999, to acquire the formal International Standard Status early in 2000. Several extensions were added since and work on some specific work-items is still in progress.

H.264/AVC
H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC, for Advanced Video Coding, is a digital video codec standard which is noted for achieving very high data compression. It was written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10) are technically identical. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May of 2003.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

To paraphrase the above H.264 is a far more advanced (part 10) implementation of MPEG-4 so it has far less compression loss at lower bitrates. Bluray is using HiDef H.264 because it is a superior Codec to even MPEG-2 (for that application).

Try it for yourself, you won't believe what it can do at even 1000kbps.

[jagabo]

29.97 fps is your problem. Your video is probably interlaced or deinterlaced with a poor filter. You need to IVTC (film) or deinterlace with a good deinterlacer.

I'm not sure if the PS3 supports DAR flags but try this: encode at 720x480 and set the DAR flag to 16:9 (or 4:3 for 4:3 sources). That way you'll retain all the resolution and the video will be scaled by the player just like a DVD. Encode in single pass constant quality (Divx) or target quantizer (Xvid) mode with a quantizer of 3. This will look almost as good as the DVD source. Use a quantizer of 2 if you want higher quality -- but this may turn out as large as the MPEG2 source.

Speaking of which -- can the PS3 play MPG files? Maybe you could just extract the MPG data from the ISO images. Mount the ISO with Daemon tools, and use DVD Decrypter in IFO mode to extract the main movie.