[jrhamilt]

Hi All!

I've recently decided to make the jump to using and HTPC. Have (obviously) settled on XBMC, and have a few generic questions on getting there...

BLUF: I've noticed that the quality (for a DVD) on my big screen from XBMC doesn't match playing the video with our Blu-Ray appliance. Am I doing something wrong?

Details:
I'm in the process of ripping all of my media (currently only DVDs - Blu-Rays later) to an unRAID server, and have installed XBMC on a couple of machines for testing purposes, including my gaming rig, and a couple of laptops with different amounts of horsepower.

To rip media, I'm using MakeMKV and compressing with Handbrake. For Handbrake, I'm using the "High Profile" default, with a couple of mods. 1) Slow Speed, 2) RF = 18.

My wife and I have compared extensively, and don't see a difference (on the computer monitor) between the raw MKV (which is loss-less - right?) and the resulting compressed MP4, so I think the compression is working just fine...

However, when you put the video up on the TV, it's just not as good as watching it through the Blu-Ray player, and it's noticeable at a distance. XBMC running on a Lenovo Yoga, Windows 8.1 (significantly overpowered for XBMC), streaming ~2 GB files over WLAN (n-standard).

I've done some searching on the forums for upscaling, but it was unsatisfactory. I'm curious if I'm doing something wrong, or perhaps if I need to find a software application to upscale the files (from a resolution perspective) prior to compressing, or... ... ...

I'm just not sure what to do at this point, and I'm hesitant to go all-in in ripping / encoding if the wife is just going to reject the result...

Thanks for your help!

I'm really looking forward to getting involved in the community here. Looks great!

[jjd-uk]

You've compressed your video from DVD and are wondering why you are noticing a worse quality that the original DVD through the blu ray player?

The sensible thing to me is to compare the mkv with the raw video and the mkv with the compressed video being played back through XBMC on the TV and not as you've done on the computer monitor, so you can establish whether what you're seeing is a result of the compression being exposed on a large screen.

I am assuming there is a difference in resolution and in size between the monitor and TV.

[jrhamilt]

JJD -

Thanks for your reply.

I did as you suggested, and well, I'm looking for the "Delete Thread" button.... Used Iron Man 2. Played both the MKV and the compressed MP4, and they looked identical. Put the DVD in the player, and resolution, artifacts, "blurriness", etc were all identical.

I guess I'm getting "Blu-Ray" spoiled. As far as I can tell, they were spot on!

I did notice a small issue (chapter 10, rotating view from inside an Air Control Tower - Window frames rotating on a very bright background) that was in both the MKV and the MP4. I am playing on the lowest quality hardware that I have, so I chalk that up to the HW not being able to stream that screen quite so well. Double checked same video file on my Gaming Rig, and the artifact was gone...

Thanks again JJD!

[scott967]

MakeMKV simply takes the contents of DVD that has a VIDEO_TS folder and uses the ifo file in there to determine the titles, audio tracks, and subtitle vobsub tracks. It then remuxes each title as selected as a separate mkv file along with the audio and subtitle tracks you select. The contents of each track are unchanged from how they appear on the original DVD. As such, the video will be MPEG-2 compressed according to the standard profile for DVD-video. If the title was anamorphically compressed ("enhanced for widescreen") on the DVD it will be flagged appropriately. When you run the MKV file through Handbrake, or other X264-based compressor (also options for audio tracks) the video track is decompressed and recompressed using MPEG-4/10 compression. Since both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/10 are lossy compressors, there will be quality loss. Two main sources of quality loss are from 1, the compression is based on the motion between frames, and 2, the color information has only 1/4th the resolution of the "b&w" information.

Aside from the compression, there are also opinions as to how the video is best rendered for display. Some people (for windows-based playback) swear by MPC-HC with the MadVR renderer as a replacement for the XBMC native dvdplayer.

scott s.
.