Xvid on a 40" TV

[mongochris]

Hi! I have downloaded a lot of xvid films/series which looks completely horrible on my 40" tv.
I use a Ps3 to stream the films, and they work fine on my brother's xbox and his 32" tv.
So I'm wondering if changing any settings on the ps3 or tv resolution will fix it?
x264 files are horribly big and takes years to download

[Megahurts]

What do the clips look like when played back from a DVD or USB memory stick on the PS3? Put clips in folder called Video.

What resolution is the PS3 set to?

[manono]

Define "horrible". Do you see the blocks in dark areas? Or what? Anyway, the first thing to do would be to calibrate your TV. Quite a few DVDs, all the Star Wars movies on DVD for example, provide a THX Optimizer calibration, which isn't too bad. You can find the list here:

http://www.thx.com/home/dvd/search.html

Click on "entire list" to see the titles.

Also, your TV is way better than your brother's, and heavily compressed AVIs often look like crap on a good LCD (?) TV set. I don't really like to watch those blurry things anymore on my Hi-Def TV.

[guns1inger]

Make sure you PS3 is connected via HDMI and upscaling method is set to full.

if your PS3 is not connected via HDMI then you are not going to be able to use the PS3 upscaler to it's full advantage. and your TV's upscaler will have to do all the work.

Also, the difference between 32 and 40 will show up more issues, as will differences in the quality of the TVs. You don't say what each TV actually is, and all TVs are not made equal. The words HD (in the file name or TV description) do not, in themselves, mean quality.

[mongochris]

Make sure you PS3 is connected via HDMI and upscaling method is set to full.

if your PS3 is not connected via HDMI then you are not going to be able to use the PS3 upscaler to it's full advantage. and your TV's upscaler will have to do all the work.

Also, the difference between 32 and 40 will show up more issues, as will differences in the quality of the TVs. You don't say what each TV actually is, and all TVs are not made equal. The words HD (in the file name or TV description) do not, in themselves, mean quality.

Yes, I see the blocks in dark areas. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
My ps3 is connected through HDMI

The clips still look bad when I use an external harddrive.
My resolution on my ps3 is set to 1080p / maximum.

[guns1inger]

Yes, I see the blocks in dark areas

Live with it. It is something that Xvid/Divx compression does. You can throw as much bitrate at it as you like, and you will still get this problem.

@Manono - on what basis do you state that his 40" is better than his brother's 32" when all the information you have is size ? I have seen a lot of crappy 40" and larger HDTVs, and some damn good 32 - 37" models that put them to shame. Size is not an indicator of quality.

[mongochris]

My brother says xvid works fine on one of his friends 40" LCD's, and it's something with my settings on my ps3 or TV which isn't right.

I've set my ps3 from 1080p to 720p.
Feeback to come.

Still looks crap

[jagabo]

Take manono's suggestion and fix the black level on your HDTV. With proper black levels that Xvid posterization in the dark areas is barely visible.

[manono]

@Manono - on what basis do you state that his 40" is better than his brother's 32" when all the information you have is size ? I have seen a lot of crappy 40" and larger HDTVs, and some damn good 32 - 37" models that put them to shame. Size is not an indicator of quality.

Well, I was extrapolating from the flimsy evidence. His is 40" and I was assuming an LCD HDTV (which turns out to be correct, I think) And the larger TV will show the artifacts more easily than will the smaller TV, no matter the relative quality of the 2 sets. I was assuming that the 32" is a CRT set (on no evidence at all), and you hardly ever have any problems viewing XviDs on them.

Now that we know the problem is the "dark blocks", as I said, the first thing to do is to calibrate it - get the brightness and contrast levels properly adjusted. I don't have any problem with dark blocks when watching AVIs on my 46" Sony LCD but, as I said, they're just too blurry for my tastes these days.

But you're right. I shouldn't have said his TV was "way better", when a smaller set could easily be of better quality. Maybe I should have said something like the problems would show up more obviously on his larger set,

[mongochris]

It still looks crap, not only where it's black, but pretty much everywhere

[mongochris]

It looks better with a contrast turned from 99 to 50 . The brightness is still on 45.
But it's still a bit blurry though, not comparable to the 32"

Yes, my brother has a 32" CRT, and mine is a 40" LCD.

[jagabo]

But it's still a bit blurry though, not comparable to the 32"

When your blowing up small frames, the bigger the screen, the blurrier the picture (at a given viewing distance).

[Soopafresh]

You're blowing up a 900kbs 640x360 Xvid file to 1920x1080 resolution. Of course you're going to see artifacts.

[mongochris]

I've changed the resolution now, so It's a bit better
But manono doesn't have problems watching xvid on his 46" LCD, so why should I have problems on my 40".

[DarrellS]

I imagine Manono is watching high bitrate files that he created himself and not low bitrate files downloaded from the internet.

You never did say what bitrate the files you have are. A 640x360 XviD at 700kbps is not going to look good on any 40" LCD.

[johns0]

A 640x360 xvid at 900kbs will look ok on a 32" crt,on a 40" 1080p lcd it will look horrible and cause you to run screaming,nothing can be done to fix that.

7 years ago 700mb xvid files were considered huge,nowadays mkv are 4gb and up and are normal in file size.

[jagabo]

It depends on the nature of the video (noisy vs clean, high action vs no action, bright vs dark, sharp vs blurry, etc.), its resolution, its bitrate, the size of the TV, the viewing distance, whether the playback device has deblocking and/or deringing filters, the quality of the upscaling, the type of connection/cables used, the knowledge/skill of the person who encoded the video (codec settings, filtering, etc), the codec used, the software used, etc.