curious about a video problem

[maca]

I'm not looking for advice on how to do anything, just curious to find out if anyone knows what causes a certain phenomenon. Here are a couple of captures from the Mondo Macabro DVD called "The Devil's Sword" which I purchased. As you can see from the first screen, the transfer looks pretty good. The second screen shows what happens with red, however. Looks like it's projected on a picket fence. There's nothing screwy with my system; reds generally look fine. This is something that is inherent in certain transfers. Everything I have from Mondo Macabro, for example, does this with reds. A few other DVDs I own are this way, too. There's no fixing it since it's in the transfer, but I'm just curious if anybody knows what causes some transfers to have this weirdness with reds?

[poisondeathray]

are you sure it's not your player's chroma upsampling algorithm? Your screenshot shows "VLC"

note some hardware players have low quality algorithms too

Try MadVR in MPCHC

https://www.videohelp.com/toolsimages/madvr_1196.jpg

[jagabo]

The chroma (color) channels are stored at half the resolution of the luma channel, 360x240 rather than 720x480. They are also often compressed more than the luma channel leading to more blocky artifacts. Furthermore your video looks like it may have gone through a DV 4:1:1 stage where the chroma channels are stored at 1/4 the luma resolution horizontally, 180x480 vs 720x480. Lastly, your decoder looks like it is performing no deblocking or smoothing of the chroma channels upon upsampling to RGB 4:4:4.

[maca]

Thanks for the input. Did a little experimenting, and found something interesting. I always have my SD DVD players set to upconvert to 1080p for my TV. I find that when I turn the HD upconvert off, the red problem goes away. What's still a mystery is why most of my DVDs can play in upconverted mode just fine, and it's only certain ones that have the red problem. As I said above, it happens on EVERY DVD made by Mondo Macabro, plus a few others I own. So it's no big deal, as it turns out I can solve the problem by just watching affected discs in SD, but I can't help wondering what's different about certain transfers when most of my DVDs show brilliantly crisp reds when upconverted to 1080p. That's what has me curious.