[geeks] home equipment inventories

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 11:37:56AM -0500, kurt at k-huhn.com wrote:

> >> Disney movies on DVD would certainly alleviate that.  I'm off to
> >> Columbiahouse.com to see what I can find...
> >
> > Plus the whole looking better bit (usually, some DVDs look worse).
> 
> DVD looks worse?  Really?  hrm...  Not that I'm an audiophile or videophile,
> but I've found that the DVDs I own are way better than the VHS tapes.  Plus
> they don't degrade over time.  One of the first Elmo's World VHS tapes that
> we bought a couple years ago has grown so bad, audio and video -wise, that I
> can't watch it.

Remeber, DVDs are just a particular form of MPEG2 stream.  And the quality put
out by different MPEG2 compressors varies widely.  Further, you have to trade
off between how much video you can have versus the quality (although I doubt 
the worst DVDs I've seen were pushing any video length limits).  Finally, MPEG2
does have weeknesses.  Blocks of similar color (say because it is a solid color
with shading variations across is), and dim lighting tend to be the main 
weeknesses.  So, you get a movie that has lots of dim lighting, and it was
apparently compressed using an inferior compressor, and you will find that the
quality can be crap.  High action can also be problematic.

If you ever are creating any type of MPEG video for streaming purposes, 
remeber, use lots of bright colors, and try not to have the action moving too 
fast.

BTW, these issues relate to why DirectTiVos are far superior to regular TiVos.
Regular TiVos use a dirt cheap IBM encoder chip, but DirectTiVos take the video
already compressed from the DirectTV stream (which also uses MPEG2).  The MPEG2
from DirectTV is compressed using expensive (like several $100k) 
encoders, compared to the cheap ones from IBM.  The more expensive encoders
just do a better job within the same bandwidth.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd