[MPlayer-users] encoding questions

[Jan Knutar]

> IMO it's not worth trying to make the comparison. DVDs use extremely
> high bitrates to make up for the fact that the idiots mastering them
> don't (can't) crop black borders and don't even attempt to align the
> borders that remain, they leave nasty distortion at the picture
> edges, sometimes even hard-telecine (which ruins quality), etc. Once
> you clean up their mess and rescale to the resolution you want to
> encode at, you're in much better shape; lots of the extra
> 'compression' comes from this stage, and not actually the mpeg4.

I was mighty pissed off when my new shiny Final Fantasy DVD had loads 
more film grain noise than some movies that are actually shot with a 
camera. 
It's rendered, ffs! There should be no film grain!!!
Maybe they expected it to be successful enough to do a "digitally 
remastered" version or some shit after everyone bought the noisy one.

I was pretty puzzled too when my cousin's brand new canon powershot even 
let you chose what sort of chemichal film you want it to simulate, 
adding grain to the digital picture...

This is all evidence of something unfortunate and stupid. All our 
exposure to analog noise has made us too used to it, when we 
artificially add it to systems without this quality reducing noise..

I expect alot of DVD bitrate goes to the film grain, as a simple hqdn3d 
let me fit a movie onto 2 cd's with lavc at DVD resolution 
(cropped,scaled to nearest 16), without any perceivable loss of detail 
:-)