DivX on full hd... help!

reflux · 12 Mar 2009 at 15:34

photoshop said:
Are you kidding?
I think you need to get your TV looked at mate because the difference in SD and HD is very noticeable even at 8 feet away.

Did I say it was a TV....?

jojjebros said:
so whats the point of buying a full hd screen then? if everything is going to look worse? would you recomend someone who only uses the screen for watching movies to buy a low ress screen?

If you sit right up close to your screen, yes. Sitting at a sensible viewing distance, the poor quality of SD will be less noticeable and you'll enjoy the bigger picture.

monkeyspank · 12 Mar 2009 at 15:40

probedb said:
@monkeyspank why do you assume they're pirated? People rip their own discs for ease of use.

Do they then moan about the quality of 'their own' rips, if they have the bluray on a shelf? rips, which by the way are still dodgy

probedb · 12 Mar 2009 at 16:57

monkeyspank said:
Do they then moan about the quality of 'their own' rips, if they have the bluray on a shelf? rips, which by the way are still dodgy

Quite possibly....'still dodgy' ?

jojjebros · 12 Mar 2009 at 20:22

reflux said:
If you sit right up close to your screen, yes. Sitting at a sensible viewing distance, the poor quality of SD will be less noticeable and you'll enjoy the bigger picture.

whats the point having a big screen if you have to sit far away... then it will become just as big as if you were sitting close to your old small screen, right?

james.miller · 12 Mar 2009 at 22:08

jojjebros said:
whats the point having a big screen if you have to sit far away... then it will become just as big as if you were sitting close to your old small screen, right?

do you sit 3 feet away from your tv in the living room?

not everybody watchs tv using a monitor on a desk you know lol

if you cant see the different between SD and HD @ 8feet then its not your tv, its your eyes that need testing

monkeyspank · 13 Mar 2009 at 10:38

probedb said:
Quite possibly....'still dodgy' ?

give it a rest. In that case, the OP should be asking about upscaling DVD. You can store like, 100 uncompressed DVDs on a £50 hard drive.

Corasik · 13 Mar 2009 at 11:08

james.miller said:
if you cant see the different between SD and HD @ 8feet then its not your tv, its your eyes that need testing

Anyone who claims they can tell the difference between a perfectly encoded 576P video, and 1080p (or 720p) on a 24inch screen at 8 ft is either lying, deluded, or has super human eyesight.

Its generally accepted that even with a 42 inch screen by 8ft most people struggle to see the difference between 1080p and 720p, and by 12ft few can even tell the difference between 576p and 1080p. On a 24inch screen those distances would be greatly reduced.

photoshop · 13 Mar 2009 at 11:53

Corasik said:
Anyone who claims they can tell the difference between a perfectly encoded 576P video, and 1080p (or 720p) on a 24inch screen at 8 ft is either lying, deluded, or has super human eyesight.

Its generally accepted that even with a 42 inch screen by 8ft most people struggle to see the difference between 1080p and 720p, and by 12ft few can even tell the difference between 576p and 1080p. On a 24inch screen those distances would be greatly reduced.

24" screen and the viewer sat 12 ft away is just stupid and pointless.
I site around 5/6 feet from my 50" and even then i want a bigger screen!

lopkinfop · 13 Mar 2009 at 13:25

i certanly can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p from 8 feet away, you just nmeed tyo see them side by side for it to be very obvious.

by generally accepted who do you mean? i could tell the difference between a SD (576p) and 720p/1080p at pretty much any distance as its quite striking

reflux · 13 Mar 2009 at 13:28

Corasik said:
Anyone who claims they can tell the difference between a perfectly encoded 576P video, and 1080p (or 720p) on a 24inch screen at 8 ft is either lying, deluded, or has super human eyesight.

Its generally accepted that even with a 42 inch screen by 8ft most people struggle to see the difference between 1080p and 720p, and by 12ft few can even tell the difference between 576p and 1080p. On a 24inch screen those distances would be greatly reduced.

Exactly. Being a poor student, unable to afford a mahoosive telly, I watch films in my bedroom, where my PC is, 8 feet away from a 24'' screen. Whilst there is a subtle difference between full 1080p Blu-Ray and a decent quality DVD rip, it's certainly not enough to warrant, for example, buying my entire DVD catalogue again on Blu-ray.

james.miller · 13 Mar 2009 at 13:35

Corasik said:
Anyone who claims they can tell the difference between a perfectly encoded 576P video, and 1080p (or 720p) on a 24inch screen at 8 ft is either lying, deluded, or has super human eyesight.

nobody claimed that, unless reflux referred to sitting 8ft away from a monitor.

masterluke · 13 Mar 2009 at 17:28

ignore the naysayers - you CAN get a very noticeable improvement on a mpeg4 SD picture on a HD set using FFDshow. It can take some tweaking but the results are VERY impressive. It will never look like HD, but it can be made to look a lot better.

I did this on my old XP HTPC but I have since migrated to Ubuntu on my HTPC (mplayer owns all) and I cant remember my old ffdshow settings. As i remember the best thing is a denoise, then a Lanzcos resize to the native res of your set, then an xsharpen.

You'll have to have a play to see what settings work best.

photoshop · 13 Mar 2009 at 17:37

See: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=922773

Hamster · 13 Mar 2009 at 23:13

reflux said:
Eaxctly - sitting 8 feet from my screen as I do, I can't tell the difference between SD and HD content.

That's strange. Are you comparing upscaled SD to HD? I'm slightly short-sighted and i can tell the difference between SD and HD from 20ft away!!

Hamster · 13 Mar 2009 at 23:14

reflux said:
Eaxctly - sitting 8 feet from my screen as I do, I can't tell the difference between SD and HD content.

That's strange. Are you comparing upscaled SD to HD? I'm slightly short-sighted and i can tell the difference between SD and HD 20ft away from a 42" 1080p plasma screen!!

Chris1712 · 13 Mar 2009 at 23:38

The difference between upscaled SD and HD, from ~8 feet away on my 28" monitor isnt HUGE, but its noticeable. Upscaling generally gets rid of the horrible pixelation and blockiness of low res sources, but it cant make up detail.

FFDshow does a job good enough for me to just about put up with watching DVD's on my 720p projector, over 92" or so from 8 feet. But only just, its still pretty nasty, but at that size not a lot looks amazing.

Hamster · 14 Mar 2009 at 02:03

Just want to add, as a previous V+ box owner and now with a Sky box, the difference in quality between upscaled SD and HD with Sky is much more marked than that with Virgin V+. This is especially the case with channels such as ITV and slightly less so with BBC channels and others.

jojjebros · 14 Mar 2009 at 10:58

hmm can somebody post a easy to use guide for FFDshow here. I have downloaded it but i do not know how to use it... I would be verry greatfull if someone posted a quic guide (whith pictures) of how you set up FFDshow to work whith bs player or VLC!

masterluke · 15 Mar 2009 at 14:24

jojjebros said:
hmm can somebody post a easy to use guide for FFDshow here. I have downloaded it but i do not know how to use it... I would be verry greatfull if someone posted a quic guide (whith pictures) of how you set up FFDshow to work whith bs player or VLC!

AFAIK VLC uses its own internal codecs rather than windows ones so forget about using that. Never used bsplayer but i think it uses the windows ones..

I dont have a windows box handy so I cant give precise instructions but the steps are something like this...

1) Remove all other codecs that are capable of playing the stuff that you want to play back - so if you want to play a divx file then go to add\remove programs and remove anything to do with divx\xvid or any codec packs you have in there.

2) Install ffdshow from somewhere like here

3) Try to play a movie with bsplayer or WMP.. it should use the ffdshow codec - you can tell by a little red icon coming up down by the clock (bottom right). If that doesnt appear then you still have some other codec installed which is doing the decoding. Im sure there will be some setting in bsplayer to set a codec priority.

4) Go to the ffdshow configuration and fiddle with the settings.. for starters you could make it look something like this...

jojjebros · 17 Mar 2009 at 16:40

thank you very much!