Best Image Quality burning AVI to DVD..

[UncleRuss]

ok first post, sorry if this has been done over and over, but i've searched the forums and cant find exactly what i'm looking for, close i think but i need confirmation from the learned members here..

I have many AVI's sitting around 700-800meg, i want to burn them individually to DVD's...I use Toast 10 on a MacBook Pro, i have read the thread regarding setting the Bitrate to the highest possible using the Bitrate calculator...here-https://forum.videohelp.com/topic365849.html

Is this the only way i can achieve maximum image quality ???

I find when i view burned DVD's on my T.V. the image quality is well below the AVI on my Laptop, very jagged and pixelated compared...
Is this unavoidable due to file size and resolution ????

cheers

[vieted]

if the movies are in avi format already then leave them as they are, just burn data DVDs. Nowadays most of DVD players will be fine with avi files, any conversion to standard DVD format will make the compressed picture in avi files looking worse on screen

[jagabo]

I find when i view burned DVD's on my T.V. the image quality is well below the AVI on my Laptop, very jagged and pixelated

Now does the DVD look on your laptop? Or, if you can, hook you laptop up to the TV and compare the original video. Think of a big TV as a magnifying glass -- with the image enlarged all the defects show up.

[UncleRuss]

I find when i view burned DVD's on my T.V. the image quality is well below the AVI on my Laptop, very jagged and pixelated

Now does the DVD look on your laptop? Or, if you can, hook you laptop up to the TV and compare the original video. Think of a big TV as a magnifying glass -- with the image enlarged all the defects show up.

yeah i do understand that, was hoping someone can point me to a way of upscaling the image quality to suit..... i'm guessing there just aint enough info in that size file..

[jagabo]

I don't know how good or bad Toast is at upscaling but there's not a lot one can do. Deblocking filters can remove some of the blocky artifacts. There are "super resolution" techniques that can reduce some of the jagged edges under certain circumstances. I don't know what's available on the Mac though.

Also, as vieted suggested, many (I would disagree with his "most" characterization though) DVD players can play Divx/Xvid AVI file. That way you would avoid any losses from re-encoding.

[guns1inger]

full movies crushed to 700 MB are full of artifacts. There is very little you can do to fix them, especially when you are then resizing up and re-encoding to another lossy format. Couple to this the fact that many of the artifacts are not always as visible on a monitor because of the lower gamma settings compared to a TV, conversions inevitably look worse once you play them back on your DVD player. SuperResolution tools aren't going to do a whole lot better than a good upsizer as such a small upscale ratio.

[UncleRuss]

thankx guys.......its probably the answer i knew was coming.....
appreciate the input..

might try the avi in data form..

[guns1inger]

What is your player, and what is your TV ?

[UncleRuss]

just copied AVi to Micro SD Card and played through USB on my PS3, cant believe the improvement......image is beautiful....

think data DVD's will now be the go....am trying that now....

Playing on a Pioneer 50" Plasma, can either go PS3 or a Pioneer DV-490V cheapy Region Free player...



Just played the Data DVD.

Beautiful, plays, improvement is unreal.....looks marginally better on the Micro SD card i think, but huge difference over the DVD burn...

very happy..thanks all..

[guns1inger]

The Pioneer does no upscaling, so all the work hangs with the TV. The PS3, on the other hand, has an incredible upscaler over HDMI. I watch most of my discs and movies using the PS3 for that reason.

Caveats : The PS 3 does not external subs. If you want subs you have to re-encode with them burned in.

I also have my PS3 on the network (wirelessly at the moment) and use PS3 Media Server to serve video directly to it. Divx/Xvid files serve easily over wireless, as do mpeg-2 files. If you have external subs, PS3MS will transcode on the fly for you, so you don't have to re-encode. The Tools section here says it is Windows only, however there are Linux and OS X versions, as it is primarily java and multi-platform, open-source library based.