Pioneer 531 XP+ inferior to XP

[strongbad]

I just did a small testing of XP+ and XP on my hard drive. I recorded Terminator 3 widescreen using S-Video. On XP+, you can see macroblocks on the black bars but on XP mode it's clear black. I then burned it to a dvd XP+ to XP and XP hi speed to XP and tried watching it on my computer and now I don't see the macroblocks on the black bars from the XP+ source. I took some pictures and it's clear black on both XP+ and XP. Why is the XP+ picture inferior to the XP without even re-encoding?

On XP+ it doesnt even use 15,000kbps, it was between 4.5-7.56mb. Even when I record fullscreen programs with XP+ it won't use a CBR of 15,000. It will vary from 6-14.5mb. Why is it a VBR when it can only be recorded to the hard drive? It doesn't make sense.

I just took the burned dvd and watched it on my tv using the 531 and I can see the damn macroblocks on the black bars and the movie picture is more fuzzier than XP. The XP copy looks super clean. What is the deal here?

Here is a sample mpeg2 of the xp and xp+ to xp. watch it on your tv aand report back.

http://s9.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0XIOXF2T0FEJ21X6DQHQLRDR7X

[Frobozz]

This is interesting. I can't recall anyone describing this problem with XP+ playback before. Because the blocks disappeared when the XP+ recording was burned at XP to a DVD, they must not have been there in the recorded material itself. The problem is happening in playback, not recording. I don't know why, though. We know that XP+ exceeds the video DVD maximum bit rate. The only explanation I can think of is that the Pioneer is choking on decoding this high a bit rate. It is a known issue that high bit rates on DVDs can cause playback problems, so maybe something similar is happening here. But I'm just guessing. I am pretty confident that the issue is playback and not encoding, however.

[MJA]

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=279460&highlight=

[strongbad]

I don't believe it's joking on decoding because if that were the case I think you'd see stutters in frames and glitches. It doesn't make any sense for it not to decode properly because of dvd compliance rules being that XP+ wasn't designed for DVD playback. It's also crazy for them to make a machine that's incapable of properly decoding it's own built XP+ mode that's supposed to take advantage of superior quality for chase playback. Even if it were the case that it couldn't handle decoding XP+ properly, it still doesn't explain why after being re-encoded to XP burned and played back in a dvd compliant disc, it still would show the artifacts clearly not present in the straight XP mode.