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ripa

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Join date
21-Oct-2005
Last activity
2-May-2014
Posts
10

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Post
#291644
Topic
Wookie Groomer's 1080p Star Wars Saga project (Released)
Time
Originally posted by: Karyudo
Originally posted by: muffin
If I'm going to re-encode something, it's going to be from the highest quality source I can get, not something that already had it's quality trashed.

Better start learnin' how to use AviSynth, etc., then. 'Cause I'm with WG: if a 13GB WMV-HD version carefully put together from the very best 1080p broadcasts out there isn't good enough for you, you're not going to find a lot of people clamoring to do any better just for you.

(BTW, it's "its quality", not "it's quality".)



I think Muffin's point was that the h264 version should be encoded from the master (whatever format Wookie Groomer has it in) instead. Also, VC-1 isn't any more proprietary than h.264. Microsoft submitted it to the SMPTE for standardization. Libavcodec implements a working open source decoder. Furthermore, VC-1 quality is comparable to h264 and VC-1 is faster to decode, so very little would be gained by (re-)encoding to h264.
Post
#245132
Topic
Info Wanted: Anyone Planning on making Anamorphic versions using 2006 OUT DVDs?
Time
I'm wondering what is there to gain by converting from letterbox to anamorphic. It won't magically recover any detail at all, and scaling always results in lost detail. You also need to re-encode, which reduces the quality even more, especially if you're not burning it on a dual-layer disc. To me there seems to be too many downsides.

If you're looking to avoid internal scaling by your television, consider this first. If you own a high-resolution (1366x768 for example) flat planel, it will scale the signal anyway. You could use a high-end dvd player that sends the television its native signal, but then the dvd player would do the scaling (in real-time of course, negating any benefits of high-quality off-line scaling). If you own a standard-definition tube television, it won't scale the signal at all. All it does in letterbox mode is widen the distance between the scanlines. No "crappy integrated scaling chips" involved. The only reason to convert to anamorphic would be if the scanlines become too visible on a widescreen CRT television when using letterbox mode.
Post
#207173
Topic
The Official 2006 Discs Will Be No Better Than What We Have!
Time
Originally posted by: eros
What's the big issue with it being anamorphic anyway? I thought we were all moving towards digital display technology eventually, so number of lines on CRT would no longer be an issue and we would be talking in pixel numbers.


An anamorphic transfer has more resolution (less pixels wasted on black bars) no matter what display device you're watching it on. You've probably misunderstood what an anamorphic transfer is since you're talking about the number of lines on CRT displays. A non-anamorphic 16:9 movie in NTSC format has 720*360=259,200 pixels for the actual content (the rest is wasted in the black bars). An anamorphic transfer has 720*480=345,600 pixels dedicated to the picture. That's a 33% increase.

That said, I can't wait for these to be released in high definition: 500% increase in resolution!
Post
#149837
Topic
.: The X0 Project Discussion Thread :. (* unfinished project *)
Time
Originally posted by: Laserman
I thought I covered most of this before?


I'm sorry, but the search function seems to be a bit limited (only searches thread titles).

Anyway, I thought that the rotational speed difference would only yield a different frame rate but otherwise compliant PAL signal. I didn't think of the effects on the modulated signal. Since both PAL and NTSC video signals are FM modulated onto a 7,1MHz carrier, playing that back at a wrong speed would shift the carrier frequency, probably causing demodulating to fail. Also, I just noticed the technical discussion forum, where I should have posted this instead. I guess I got too excited about the prospect of playing back PAL discs on the X0. Sorry about that.
Post
#149615
Topic
.: The X0 Project Discussion Thread :. (* unfinished project *)
Time
A lot of what makes the X0 player great, though, is exactly the part that definitely DOES NOT deal with PAL, and that's the NTSC decoders in parallel, and all that other sort of post-processing circuitry. If you have to ditch that, then why bother with an X0? It would probably be smarter to gut a 2950, which can already play PAL discs natively.


I thought the big deal with the x0 player was that it didn't postprocess anything unlike other players and outputed the cleanest possible composite signal read from the disc with a special laser. And since the signal on the disc is already in the composite format it wouldn't need any coding/decoding (maybe those parallel NTSC thingies are used for s-video, component, and/or antenna outputs?). So unless the PAL discs are fundamentally different (not just a different signal format), I would imagine they can be read with an NTSC player, unless it has some PAL disc detection circuit that cuts off the output if PAL signal is detected. So what does happen when you put a PAL disc in an NTSC player? I guess this is a bit farfetched
Post
#149541
Topic
.: The X0 Project Discussion Thread :. (* unfinished project *)
Time
I was wondering if there are major physical differences between NTSC and PAL discs. Since the signal is encoded onto the disc, the player needn't do any actual signal coding/decoding, just read it off the disc and output it. So my point is that what if it's possible to play back PAL discs on the X0 player. I would imagine at least PAL CAV discs could be played, although with an out of specs signal (625 lines at 60 fields per second). Maybe some highish-end capture cards could cope with such a signal. If not, the signal could be digitized with some general purpose ADC card (maybe even at 16-bit precision!). The signal could then be processed with software (flexibility in implementing the comb filter for example) to be the Ultimate Laserdisc transfer.

PS. the raw digitized signal (sampled at 20 MHz, 16 bits, which is enough for ~2000*625 at 30fps) would be ~270MB uncompressed on a hard drive. Dropping the blank lines would yield ~250GB, and lossless compression might halven that to ~125GB.
Post
#149534
Topic
Info Wanted: has anyone tried a Star Wars Super 8mm to DVD preservation project?
Time
I don't think a heavy color cast on film matters very much. You can quite easily correct colors in photo and video editors and since color resolution isn't as important as monochrome resolution, you probably won't notice the loss after the colors are corrected. Here's a good example of restoring some photo negatives from the 1970s: http://www.californiacoastline.org/dwbphotos.html

Also, there's probably film scanners that can automatically scan a large number of frames on the market at reasonable prices. All it needs is a mechanism to advance the film after completing one scan and software for saving the images automatically.