[Grall]

Since my PS3 died the other day I'm now forced to use my PC as a DVD player and the results are far, far from satisfactory.

Right now I've settled with windows media player because it's the one piece of software that will play DVDs without first needing a download and install procedure, and the resulting image is just extraordinarily bad. There's color dithering galore all over, and the contrast seems off, like the image is darker than it should be - or at least darker than I remember seeing it on the PS3.

The dithering however is the main issue. It's not even regular dithering in some sort of ordered pattern, it actually looks rather like a digital version of VHS color bleed, which gives very bad associations.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Are you trying to play SD DVDs onto a HD display?

Two suggestions: Turn on the various video enhancements in CCC or download Shark's video codecs and use FFDShow with a load of enhancements enabled.

[Grall]

It's just regular DVD material; I wouldn't try to torture the crusty old DVD format with HD rez stuff... The display is an old 1280*1024 LCD (which doesn't quite qualify as a HD display I'd think), due to the previous one dying unfortunately. Don't have the cash right now to buy a new one (blew all my savings on a macbook...)

To be more specific, it's my official The X-Files retail box I'm trying to enjoy, the encoding on those discs is decent although not spectacular seeing as it's TV source material and not cinema. It might be shot on film stock rather than video, I'm not sure, but I'd be surprised if they did the transfer with the film material as a base, seeing as all the SFX probably is on video tape... Still, it should look a lot better than what I'm seeing, almost any DVD does. Certainly anything I've bought, as I don't scrounge the bottom of the bargain bins for cheap direct-to-video releases...

I looked through the video section of the CCC, and pretty much all of the "enhancements" are already turned on by default and the resulting image looks far far worse than it did without all that stuff last time I used windows media player to watch DVDs, which was back before GPU-assisted video playback came in vogue, when windows vista was new and my (then current) system had a 8800GTX video card in it.

Heck, downloaded youtube videos look better than this...

Now, there are sliders I could play with, but I'm like, why should I HAVE to? This should just work. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I should turn all the enhancements OFF instead. I'll try that next time before I start up WMP again, I don't know how the player will react if I start screwing around with the settings, maybe they won't take effect, I dunno.

[Reznor007]

Try Media Player Classic Home Cinema http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ Always gives me good results.

[swaaye]

Yes, make sure you turn off all of ATI's video enhancement options. It makes all video that passes thru DXVA look awful. Some of the features might be useful in certain cases but overall no.

Except deinterlacing. That is very beneficial if you are playing interlaced material.

Also make sure MLAA is off because it will affect video.

[Grall]

I turned it all off, it was a definite improvement, but DVD video is still noticeably grainy/dithered (for lack of a better term) for whatever bizarre reason I can't fathom. Makes me a sad panda that "enhancements" lead to worse quality...

[swaaye]

It's the same kind of thing with default settings on HDTVs. Crank the sharpening and denoising. Maybe do some hacks to make whites and blacks more intense, aka vivid or dynamic mode. Auto contrast and any sort of auto color are nasty too. I can only guess that for some people it looks like a tangible improvement and it helps make sales.

But other than that stuff you should be good to go unless your monitor has color issues. You could also try Media Player Classic combined with either Haali's renderer or MadVR. They fully bypass all of the video card's video processing. But they do not support DXVA and I don't think there's any way to use them with Bluray.

[orangpelupa]

MPCHC can do DXVA but i forgot how to set it on...

btw also try VLC from videolan.
its can bypass many things too.

[digitalwanderer]

The X-files DVD are shite quality, me and my wife are watching them now and the first season just staggered me at how awful the quality was.

Really blocky in the black areas, right?

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by orangpelupa

MPCHC can do DXVA but i forgot how to set it on...

You have to use one of the EVR (Vista/7) or VMR9 (XP) outputs and also have a MPEG2, H.264 or VC-1 decoder with DXVA support. Windows 7 comes with all of them. MPCHC includes VC1 and H.264 decoders of its own for XP/Vista. You can get MPEG2 DXVA for XP by finding a codec pack with the Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

The X-files DVD are shite quality, me and my wife are watching them now and the first season just staggered me at how awful the quality was.

Yeah I noticed the low quality of the earlier seasons on Netflix. It's a common thing with older shows. There's a lot of noise and film grain, and MPEG2 doesn't handle that well especially at the relatively low bitrate of a 4-eps-per-disc DVD set.

[Grall]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

The X-files DVD are shite quality, me and my wife are watching them now and the first season just staggered me at how awful the quality was.

I'm in PAL territory so I have a different encoding compared to you Murricans... I didn't notice any HUGE issues when I could use my PS3 to watch, but it has a quite good decoding and scaling engine from what I understand which might help to clean up some of the artefacts, I dunno.

It may also be you have an older set of the material, and that a later re-issue of the discs featured better encoding... Hey, it happens, sometimes!

Anyway, thanks for all the help and suggestions, guys. It's appreciated!

[Grall]

Originally Posted by swaaye

It's a common thing with older shows. There's a lot of noise and film grain, and MPEG2 doesn't handle that well especially at the relatively low bitrate of a 4-eps-per-disc DVD set.

My STTNG box set is pretty crap for the early seasons. It's like they just scanned the stuff straight off the dirtiest film copy they could find back in the recesses of their archive...but for the X-files, what annoys me most is Scully's terrible hair early on. Hooooly crap, that's an ugly 'do!

[swaaye]

Yeah TNG is not great overall. Just about every show from the early '90s or older has quality issues.

[Reznor007]

STTNG looks especially bad as all the special effects were done on video, not film, so the master is video quality.

[swaaye]

Yup and that is a huge problem for a BD release. I'm still wondering if they'll ever bother to do that. Most of the effects need to be redone from what I've read.

[mrcorbo]

Originally Posted by Grall

It's just regular DVD material; I wouldn't try to torture the crusty old DVD format with HD rez stuff... The display is an old 1280*1024 LCD (which doesn't quite qualify as a HD display I'd think), due to the previous one dying unfortunately. Don't have the cash right now to buy a new one (blew all my savings on a macbook...)

Is your display connected with VGA or DVI/HDMI?

[Grall]

Originally Posted by Reznor007

STTNG looks especially bad as all the special effects were done on video, not film, so the master is video quality.

Pretty damn sure STTNG used opticals/bluescreen effects, thus film. The effects are naturally not up to movie quality though so they probably cheated everywhere they could, knowing it would be transferred to video before broadcast.

[swaaye]

It has a crazy mixture. The live action is film but the space shots are mostly video. Then there are the phaser beams and transporter effects and such. You can see interlacing artifacts in these shots sometimes. It's a real mess of [money saving] techniques.

On the DVDs it's a mix of 30fps interlaced video and 24fps telecined film. It plays havoc with poor IVTC schemes (choppy space shots). Some of the early ILM space shots are film however, but later it was all video at ImageG. If you look for it you will notice that the space shots are slightly more fluid than the live action because of the higher frame rate.

[Grall]

Hurm, no interlacing or nuttin' on the PAL DVDs... Also, no differences in framerate either that I've ever been able to discern. After all, PAL doesn't use 3:2 pulldown or whatever it's called, so that might be the reason.

[swaaye]

The PAL DVDs play the audio about +4% too fast so everybody sounds ever so slightly extra high pitched. PAL DVDs are tricky things when they come from NTSC land. There was probably some deinterlacing done to make them and it could cause them to be even nastier than the NTSC edition. The video segments are inherently interlaced I believe so they would need to be deinterlaced to make a progressive PAL DVD. If there's any weird ghosting in panning shots then they didn't do a good job.

[Grall]

No ghosting, the later seasons (when they supposedly started using 'inferior' video effects) look quite nice and clean. It's just the earliest stuff that's a bit grainy and colors are a bit washed-out too. But then again, TNG never was all that flashy, with the color scheme of the Enterprise looking like a tan hotel lounge, and all those jumpsuits people wore...

[Grall]

As a small aside, playing the same DVD(s) on my Macbook using apple's own included DVD player software gives the expected level of image quality, which is a bit noisy but not terribly awful.

As might be expected, I now actually use the mac for watching my X-Files DVDs, even though the built-in speaker leaves a lot to be desired from a fidelity standpoint. I can deal with that, considering audio is not the most important factor of the series, or even video actually; but rather the story itself.

I found a nice mini displayport to DVI cable at my preferred PC vendor that allows me to view the action on a larger external monitor, and as for sound I guess I could wear a set of headphones. Hm. Now that's a thought...!