Help me ! HD 1080P Xvid AC3 or 720p.BluRay.x264

Skyforger

Skyforger

Skyforger

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I just watched HD 1080P Xvid AC3 and qualiry was good but it looked like it was taken in cinema like you could see some film grain. It didn't feel like proper HD. So witch one from above is better in video quality ?
HD 1080P Xvid AC3 or 720p.BluRay.x264 ?

P.S. I am a bit off quality freak.
 
Grain = detail. I suggest you read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grain

Movies filmed on photographic film will always have grain as that is what you see when you zoom into a piece of film. Movies recorded in digital format obviously wont have grain however its up to the director how they want their movie to "feel" and quite often digitally add grain.

As for your question, xvid is an inferior codec. Forget the resolution, x264 has an inloop deblocker and XviD ALWAYS shows signs of macroblocking, regardless of how much bitrate you throw at it. I disregarded XviD as a codec of choice a long time ago.
 
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Skyforger said:
I just watched HD 1080P Xvid AC3 and qualiry was good but it looked like it was taken in cinema like you could see some film grain. It didn't feel like proper HD. So witch one from above is better in video quality ?
HD 1080P Xvid AC3 or 720p.BluRay.x264 ?

P.S. I am a bit off quality freak.
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then watch the original blurays as they are better than both. lovefilm, £15 a month...whats your excuse?
 
Skyforger said:
Ok... so you saying the 720p BlueRay is better than the HD 1080P Xvid ?
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There is so much wrong with this question. "720p Blu-Ray" implies the SOURCE is Blu-Ray and its been downscaled to 720p. "HD 1080p XviD" merely suggests the video is encoded with the XviD codec and the resolution is 1080p. It makes no mention of source.

You really need to understand that codec, source, resolution etc. are all separate entity's and are important to understand the quality of a particular encode.
 
If you are seriously a "quality freak" then you have a lot to learn... as stated above film grain is intentional and to remove it would be removing detail from the picture which isn't the sort of thing a "quality freak" would want. I'm guessing that a "quality freak" would prefer to watch a movie without the artifacts that are likely to be present from xvid encodes. x264 is a modern codec and will preserve more of the source detail and introduce fewer artifacts.

Whether 1080p xvid or 720p x264 is preferred is down to personal preference. Some people are more bothered by stuff like macroblocking than others. If you want a truer representation of the original source then its x264 all the way.
 
How about neither. Recompressed, rescaled(720p) copies of bluray, or so called HD downloads (typically less than 4GB in size) are no way comparible with the 15+Gb versions on bluray disks.

The vast majority of blurays are 1080p, 24fps, with a selection of soundtracks.

Good old DVD could carry 9Gb of data, if a simple codec change was "all" that was required for true HD quality, then the development of BluRay and HD-DVD would have been for nothing. Even with the best codecs the less compression required the better :)
 
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Corasik said:
How about neither. Recompressed, rescaled(720p) copies of bluray, or so called HD downloads (typically less than 4GB in size) are no way comparible with the 15+Gb versions on bluray disks.

The vast majority of blurays are 1080p, 24fps, with a selection of soundtracks.

Good old DVD could carry 9Gb of data, if a simple codec change was "all" that was required for true HD quality, then the development of BluRay and HD-DVD would have been for nothing. Even with the best codecs the less compression required the better :)
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You can re-encode AVC/VC1 transparently to x264. I was going to say quite easily but its not easy at all, each movie is different and requires different settings. Some films are not very re-compressible at all, others drastically so. Studios do not sit and go "I need to make this encode as efficient as possible" rather "I have 50GB to play with, I'll just use 30Mbps on the video, throw in some audio tracks and extras and voila, job done." There fore if you take time with your encoding you can get transparent results.
 

Seriously though, an MKV with x264 and the lossless PCM audio compressed to multichannel AAC would probably be the best if you want the file as small as possible whilst still maintaining quality.
 
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Corasik said:
How about neither. Recompressed, rescaled(720p) copies of bluray, or so called HD downloads (typically less than 4GB in size) are no way comparible with the 15+Gb versions on bluray disks.

The vast majority of blurays are 1080p, 24fps, with a selection of soundtracks.

Good old DVD could carry 9Gb of data, if a simple codec change was "all" that was required for true HD quality, then the development of BluRay and HD-DVD would have been for nothing. Even with the best codecs the less compression required the better :)
Click to expand...

While i agree that 1080p downscaled to 720 x264 won't have the same clarity as the source - it can still be VERY good. "True HD" = 1080p I agree BUT "HD Ready" = only 720p and therefore CAN be called proper HD. Also some material such as animations compress extremely well and can provide a fantastic picture at lower bitrates.
 
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