Encoded MPG's look good on the computer, bad on the TV

[zyoc]

I use CCE 2.67 to encode captured video into DVD format MPG's. The source videos are 720x480 avi's captured from TV and edit in Vide Studio 7. I then use CCE to do a 9 pass VBR encode (2000 min, 5000 avg, 9000 max). The videos look great on the computer, very clean, very few artifacts; but when I burn them to DVD and play them on the TV they have a lot of artifacts, aren't very sharp and look bad. I use DVD lab to build the DVD but I don't think it does any encoding. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Will

[edDV]

Re: Capture, what kind of avi? DV? Uncompressed?
Capture device?

Project format DV? Other?

How does the DVD look played back on the computer?
Describe more fully the TV artifacts.

Could you cap and post a frame? Choose one that looks bad on TV.

[zyoc]

Captured to a PIC Video MJPEG, Quality 17.

The capture device is a cheap card using Phillips TV7131 WDM capture device. I use Virtual Dub 1.6.4 with a direct show driver (after 1.6.4 I have trouble getting the audio and video to sync).

The final Project is a 720x480 mpg.

The DVD's look good on the computer.

The artifacts are basically the typical blockey looking distortions, but don't appear when watched on the computer.

I'll cap a frame when I can but I'm not at home right now.

Thanks for the help
Will

[redwudz]

9 pass with CCE? Even 5 passes is overkill, you are unlikely to gain any quality, just use a lot of time.

Sure sounds like they are being re-encoded if the quality drops that much after burning.

[guns1inger]

DVD Lab doesn't encode, however it does have a transcoder to reduce oversize material. IT DOES NOT do this of it's own accord. You must select this function for it to have any affect.

And I agree, 9 passes is just treading water.

[Nelson37]

What size monitor and what size TV?

Have you tried comparing the IDENTICAL SOURCE on both devices, by that I mean playing the burned disk on the PC? You need to eliminate the variables in order to make a comparison. No need to spend time discovering what may or may not have happened during the burn process, simply compare the Same Thing on both devices. Otherwise you have no useful information, you are comparing two different things.

9 passes is at least 5 too many. Also 9000 max may be too high for your standalone player, allowing for audio and possible momentary spikes in bitrate allowed by the software you could be exceeding DVD maximums for a standalone.

[spectroelectro]

This is actually a very common outcome. The reason is that an analog TV set and a computer monitor have radically different properties.

An analog TV is interlaced, while a computer monitor isn't. The color temperature of a typical computer monitor is very different from the color temperature of the typical analog TV set. The phosphor persistence of an analog TV set is much longer than on a computer monitor.

You can verify this for yourself by simply taking an AverKey SVGA-to-composite-video box and playing a divx or other compressed video file on the computer screen and set up your analog TV side by side and watch it on both the TV and computer monitor simultaneously. The exact same source material playing at the same time looks wildly different on the two types of displays.

Divx-encoded or other compressed types of video are typically encoded on and for computer monitors, and look pretty decent on a computer monitor if the encode is done reasonably well. Bright light sources look sharp, dark regions of the picture look black, and colors look vibrant on a computer.

The exact same source material playing from the TV out of your video card or from an AverKey SVGA-to-composite-video box on an analog TV show hideous banding around bright light sources, muddy blocks where there should be black shadows, moving pixelations in near-monochromatic backgrounds and much more muted colors on an analog TV.

There's no easy way to fix this. You can try running various combos of VDub filters to fix some of these artifacts, but the bottom line is that divx leaves a great many encoding artifacts especially at low bitrates, and unlike mpeg-2 even when you ramp up the bitrate on divx you've still got a lot of encoding artifacts. And those encoding artifacts tend to show up much more visibly on an analog TV set than on a computer monitor.

Divx and mpeg-2 belong to two different worlds and should stay there. I have some divx files I watch with enjoyment on the computer, and they look okay. If I were to transfer 'em to mpeg-2 and burn 'em straight onto DVD as with the program VSOdivxtompg, they'd look like crap on an analog TV. Contrariwise, all my commercial DVDs look muted and not very impressive when I used WinDVD to play 'em on the computer monitor, whereas the same factory-stamped commercial DVDs look great on an analog TV.