Which filters did the scene use to make their XviD rips look so good?

[orion44]

During the XviD's heyday, which filters were most popular with encoding groups, that made their XviD releases look so good?

[VoodooFX]

They never were good. Because scene rules prohibited them looking good.

[orion44]

They never were good. Because scene rules prohibited them looking good.

Are you sure? I remember lots of XviD releases by encoding groups having a very pleasing look. I always thought that they've used some filters to create that look.

I was just curious if anyone knows which filters were most popular with encoding groups during that time.

[TubeBar]

There were scene tools pack they used, I can't recall as it's been ages but used to have a copy. They did look good but back then you weren't watching on 4k TVs either. They would look worse than a DVD nowadays on a 4K TV. Those filters and Xvid are out dated by all means.

[lordsmurf]

During the XviD's heyday,

Put a year on that.

[johns0]

Xvid didn't use any filters,just enough bitrate to make it kinda look good on a 24 inch tv back in 1998.

[hello_hello]

Yeah it's amazing how much evil a CRT TV can hide. I still have some old xvid encodes that looked perfectly fine on my CRT, but not so much on a HD display, especially when viewed up close.

[TubeBar]

Xvid didn't use any filters,just enough bitrate to make it kinda look good on a 24 inch tv back in 1998.

Yeah people doing those rips were not exactly Videophiles or even industry pros. Was just rip it as FAST as possible according to whatever scene specs were before someone else does it. I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

[orion44]

During the XviD's heyday,

Put a year on that.

A period from 2004 to 2008, or maybe even 2009.

[VoodooFX]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

If you mean a la axxxo crappy transcodes then yeah.
There were very qood anamorphic XviD rips made with the custom matrices, but that was prohibited by the scene rules. Actually x264 couldn't beat custom XviD quality till maybe ~2007.

[orion44]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

If you mean a la axxxo crappy transcodes then yeah.
There were very qood anamorphic XviD rips made with the custom matrices, but that was prohibited by the scene rules. Actually x264 couldn't beat custom XviD quality till maybe ~2007.

Why did the scene prohibited custom matrices?

[orion44]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

One of the reasons is that, in combination with AviSynth filters, it could produce a very visually pleasing look, better than the DVD itself.

[Skiller]

I think the best DVD backup is a straight copy of VIDEO_TS folder. Or an ISO file. Or a remux into MKV. The size should no longer be an issue these days, therefore there shouldn't be a need for re-encoding, right?

[lollo]

Yes, today re-encoding an already compressed mpeg2 stream makes no sense

[johns0]

[QUOTE=orion44;2700354]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

I still think Xvid is best for making DVD backups, while x264 is more suited for making 720p and 1080p Blu-ray rips.

Please fix your quote,i never said that.

[orion44]

I think the best DVD backup is a straight copy of VIDEO_TS folder. Or an ISO file. Or a remux into MKV. The size should no longer be an issue these days, therefore there shouldn't be a need for re-encoding, right?

A DVD rip can look more visually pleasing than the DVD itself if one knows which AviSynth filters to apply.

That's why I wanted to know which filters were most popular with encoding groups from 2004 to 2008.

It's a shame there's no AviSynth scripts available publicly from these encoding groups of the 2000s to study them.

[orion44]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

I still think Xvid is best for making DVD backups, while x264 is more suited for making 720p and 1080p Blu-ray rips.

Please fix your quote,i never said that.

Fixed.

[johns0]

Not fixed.

[Alwyn]

@Orion44, it was Tubebar that said "I hated Xvid", not @Johnsi.

You need to change all your Johns0 quotes in posts 12,15 and 17 to Tubebar. Just edit the name in the quote code.

[orion44]

@Orion44, it was Tubebar that said "I hated Xvid", not @Johnsi.

You need to change all your Johns0 quotes in posts 12,15 and 17 to Tubebar. Just edit the name in the quote code.

I think I fixed it now.

[Alwyn]

Post 15 still needs amending.

[Skiller]

A DVD rip can look more visually pleasing than a DVD itself if one knows which AviSynth filters to apply.

If the source DVD is only mediocre to almost good, yes, the Xvid re-encode can be filtered to be superior and somewhat more visually pleasing.
If the source DVD is pristine, no, there is nothing to improve. Optimizing for the lower bitrate of the Xvid encode is not improving the source, it's just limiting the damage of the re-encode.

[lollo]

Even if the DVD is mediocre, after the AviSynth filtering, there is no reason to compress with Xvid or similar. Just use h264.

[hello_hello]

Why did the scene prohibited custom matrices?

Because hardware players (or at least DVD players capable of playing mpeg4 video) mostly used chipsets that were incapable of decoding a custom matrix.
Looking at AutoGK's settings, the two common chipsets were ESS and MTK. I'm pretty sure the first required the default matrix while the latter could handle a custom one, although that may have been limited to a specific matrix. I can't remember..

I really don't understand why people still like Xvid. The B-frame quality is terrible, the default matrix throws a lot of high frequency information away, and it's prone to blocking and banding. Plus it didn't reduce the file size by a staggering amount compared to mpeg2. The file sizes tended to be lower because video was usually encoded at a reduced resolution compared to DVD. A width of 640 was commonly used, sometimes lower, but a width of 720 was the maximum most DVD players could handle, so you couldn't increase the width to resize to square pixel dimensions, you had to reduce the height instead.

I remember playing around with some custom matrices years ago, and a matrix designed to encode all the detail could look very good. I can still remember encoding one particular video which was quite noisy (lots of fine grain) and a high bitrate matrix encoded the grain extremely well. Almost surprisingly well, which is why I remember it, but the bitrate was stupid-high.

If a "scene encode" somehow managed to defy the laws of physics and look good, chances are it's because it was encoded from a HD source so the source quality was better than a DVD to begin with. If I remember correctly, scene encodes came in fixed file sizes back then. 350MB or 700MB etc, depending on the duration, so the quality was all over the place, because the same bitrate/file sizes were always used. And HD to SD encodes were always done without converting the HD colorimetry to SD colorimetry, and because Xvid has no way of specifying colorimetry, players assumed SD colorimetry, which is why "scene encoded" AVIs tended to look a little off color-wise, and/or a bit dark.

[VoodooFX]

They never were good. Because scene rules prohibited them looking good.

Are you sure? I remember lots of XviD releases by encoding groups having a very pleasing look.

Yes. By today's standards all the scene XviD rips are garbage, the trash can material.

[sophisticles]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

One of the reasons is that, in combination with AviSynth filters, it could produce a very visually pleasing look, better than the DVD itself.

Why would the scene group care if it looked better than the DVD, I would think they would want that.

I remember one group that was very popular for a while, they used a 4 letter acronym that started with a Y, people would rave about them and they would post pics "of the final quality" along with their torrents and a few times they advertised for people to join their group.

Personally I never found any of their stuff that good, passable to decent but not good.

[Skiller]

I remember Xvid often failed to impress me because in many cases it only looked OK when viewed on a computer, where the Xvid decoder could do it's post processing (deblocking and deringing). When played on a standalone player, there was no post processing and it looked meh.

I then started to use my GPU's S-Video out to circumvent this but it was always a hassle to play a video like this.

[orion44]

I hated Xvid I don't know why people think it was so great not even DVD quality, just transcoded garbage lol

One of the reasons is that, in combination with AviSynth filters, it could produce a very visually pleasing look, better than the DVD itself.

Why would the scene group care if it looked better than the DVD, I would think they would want that.

I remember one group that was very popular for a while, they used a 4 letter acronym that started with a Y, people would rave about them and they would post pics "of the final quality" along with their torrents and a few times they advertised for people to join their group.

Personally I never found any of their stuff that good, passable to decent but not good.

I think that was an x264 release group. They produced very small 720p and 1080p x264 rips, but the quality was horrible.