!Maximum! quality Xvid settings, no compromises.

[The.Yield]

Did some testing and got some saddening results lol.

I've found that I'm not just getting color banding/stepping in cartoons/anime, but everything. Such as on the deeply out of focus backgrounds in Wedding Crashers.

What's strange is that you cannot really see it on still frames (I would think you would be able to).

The dithering really does help but it adds a very noticable haze to the picture.

All I'm doing in VdubMod is a nulltransform with cropping and then resizing, just those 2 filters (using the Xvid settings you suggested (TQ@2)).

Here's a frame from a section of video that makes color banding really appearnt (opening creds of Nausicaa).



Again, you can't see it in the still frame but when in motion on the player, it's crazy. Color banding is very visable during playback.

On a different note (that might actually be fixable). I have noticed some very sparse corruption/artifacting in the video I've been encoding on those settings.

I will edit with some example frames shortly.

EDIT: Here is a sample frame from nausicaa which shows the artifacting. The film is fading to black when this happens so the frame is quite dark.



Note that it only appears on the player (not on the PC) and is very repeatable. Not sure what that could mean but I thought it to be important information lol.

Any thoughts on that?

[jagabo]

Does the banding look something like this on the portable:



That's the same image converted to 15 bit color.

Regarding the blocks in the dark image -- are you talking about the blocks in the lower left corner:

(gamma adjusted for visibility)

Does that only happen in very dark areas? If so, it might just be a black level issue on the portable (this is common on LCD displays). On my computer the image is almost totally black. On a TV I could see the light blocks in the lower left corner. Are you sure they're not in the source? Fade in and fade out are the hardest things for MPEG compression.

Can the player play VOB files? Try putting one of the DVD VOB files onto it and see how the picture looks.

[The.Yield]

Ya that's pretty much what it looks like. *sigh* lol

As to the blocks (and yes I was refering to the blocks)...

It is only there when played on the player, not on the PC, so It cannot be the source.

These errors never happened when I encoded with Constant Bitrate. I think the player just doesn't like TQ's. I also got a very weird artifiact in Wedding Crashers too. Though I cannot replicate it.

Perhaps you could suggest ideal CB quality settings? I know I want as MUCH bitrate as possible but what about the weird settings? Average period and smoother?

[jagabo]

As to the blocks (and yes I was refering to the blocks)...

It is only there when played on the player, not on the PC, so It cannot be the source.

These errors never happened when I encoded with Constant Bitrate. I think the player just doesn't like TQ's. I also got a very weird artifiact in Wedding Crashers too. Though I cannot replicate it.

Ah, I know what's going on. A constant quality encode will use whatever bitrate is necessary to achieve the specified picture quality. A fade in/out scene requires lots of bitrate because every pixel in the frame is changing. So the bitrate is exceeding what the portable player can handle. This is what I meant earlier when I said that the player might not be able to handle a Q=2 encoding. Try Q=3 or something in between. You won't see much difference at normal playback speeds.