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zajc Guest
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 2:03 am Post subject: Mindcandy 2, HDTV, Progressive Scan and PAL |
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First of all congrats to you Trixter & to everyone else who helped you out on getting a release candidate out... At first I was skeptical seeing a PC dude was going to do a release of Amiga demos, but, damn, you put so much research into it that I don't think anyone will get even close to the quality of MindCandy 2 any time soon.
I was wondering how is the DVD encoded w/respect to all the fun progressive-scan stuff?
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html
gives a nice overview of what's done out there by different players and DVD-encoding crowd. I was wondering how you chose to encode things..
I own the OPPO OPDV971H which passes all of the DVD benchmarks, so it can handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and it's also a cheap player.
All of the decoded MPEG stream ends up going to the Faroudja DCDi chip, which has plenty of options to compensate for encoding problems, etc. The chip has state of the art scaling and deinterlacing algorithms.
This works great for regular film content but I am a bit anxious to see how it would interact with something that is pure computer graphics, like, er.. SOTA , which you had plenty of fun with
What kind of scaling do you do on your PAL DVD?
Things could get really really fancy here, especially since it's damn hard to reproduce that nice raster effect that having only 256 vertical lines does -- pixels are kind of spaced out rather than being rectangular blocks like they are in 320x200 VGA on a PC.
With the native 1280x720P output, the DVD player is going to scale everything anyway. I could force it to 640x480P, but then the projector which is 1280x720 is going to do the (lower-quality) upscaling anyway. This is why I will most likely go for the PAL DVD. If things have to get scaled, I'd rather start with as high of a resolution as I can.
What (if anything) happens with overscan?
AFAIK many demos are clearly (ab)using overscan to give that OMG -it's-gonna-jump-out-of-my-screen effect.
What do you do with progressive-scan?
I am assuming you're having to scale stuff one way or the other. Progressive scan would give you a higher resolution, which the DVD players like mine would take full advantage of. However, stuff wouldn't be 50 fps then.
I can (cringe) turn the progressive-scan off in my DVD player, I THINK. If I can't it might be interesting seeing what it does. I have MindCandy 1, but I don't know how good of an indicator of what happens in MC2 it is...
I understand you are pretty busy so you might not have time to reply to this ultralong post....
Thanks anyway,
!ZAJC!/GDS |
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dmw Site Admin
Joined: 30 Jan 2002 Posts: 211 Location: Oregon
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject: Re: Mindcandy 2, HDTV, Progressive Scan and PAL |
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1) I have the OPPO DV-970HD player. Uses a MediaTek deinterlacer, which, unfortunately, isn't as good as your Genesis Faroudja. But I can do any test you'd like me to.
2) PAL will be the purest form of the DVD with most resoution, so if you want the best quality, stick with that disc. Since all the demos were recorded in PAL. Jim is working on NTSC conversion and we should have that disc shortly for testing. It will be interesting to see how deinterlacers handle the content and how it looks.
3) I don't believe we are doing any scaling. So, if you have a wide screen TV or project you'll probably want to overscan (fill all or zoom). Although that mightl make things look fat depending on the scaling.
4) I tested the disc on a plasma and it lookd great (when scaled and not in 4:3).
5) I'll have to test on my 16x9 TV (Sony 50") however the Sony doesn't do PAL--can you believe that...so I have to have the DVD player convert to NTSC which isn't that great. If your TV has a good scaler use 576p out of the DVD player. Projector you say. Who makes it? It was probably made by the company I work for, so it would be better than what is in your DVD player.
6) Overscan will lose some of the black on the top/bottom and any extra garbage that might appear on the left/right border area. IMO if you can overscan, do so, it will look best.
7) I'm not sure we did anything with progressive scan on the DVD.
-dan |
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Trixter Guest
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Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2006 6:06 pm Post subject: Re: Mindcandy 2, HDTV, Progressive Scan and PAL |
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dmw wrote: |
7) I'm not sure we did anything with progressive scan on the DVD.
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Nope. We almost did; Fate Fits Karma was provided in 480p. But when it became apparent that the best way to encode the video was as one long file, treating it differently became extremely difficult (the motion vector strategy and progressive/interlaced flags would switch in the middle of the giant video asset, then switch back again) so we abandoned the idea.
If all the assets had been separate files, then it definitely would have been encoded with progressive flags and a progressive strategy.
It still looks awesome, so no worries |
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