On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, Michael Hanke wrote: > I have some material which is widescreen in letter box format. Since the > quality is rather high (Digital Satellite --> SVHS-cable --> (re)digitize) I > am thinking of transforming the picture to DVD_WIDE (720x576 and 16:9). My > question: is this a good idea or should I rely on the TV-set to do a better
I do NOT think it's a good idea. Upscaling ~20-30% (depending if you're in a NTSC or PAL area) degrades the quality so much I couldn't watch it (yes - I've done it and didn't like the results ;)). > job? If so, which additional filters do you suggest (yuvcorrect CONFORM etc) > in order to get rid of scaling artifacts? There's no filter that I know of which can overcome the effects of upscaling. The data is already 'broadcast legal' (well, it _should_ be if the TV station is operating correctly ;)) so "yuvcorrect CONFORM" (which simply clips/cores the data to broadcast range) will not do anything to improve the picture. On the other hand it won't harm anything either :) If you really want to do it then here's how to go about it. As an example (and because I know the numbers ;)) for NTSC a 16:9 movie that has been letter boxed to 4:3 has an active area of 360 lines - the black bars are 60 lines at top and bottom (60 + 360 + 60 = 480). Broadcast (NTSC) MPEG streams I've seen are always 704x480 (NOT 720x480!) so that's why 704 is used below. You might need to check the attributes of the stream (ProjectX is useful for this purpose as well as demultiplexing the transport streams). This is all from memory as I go along rather than cut&paste so hopefully there aren't any typos ;) The assumption is that the data is top field first - that seems to be the usual field dominance for TV. mpeg2dec -o pgmpipe input.m2v | pgmtoy4m -a 10:11 -r 30000:1001 -i t -x 420mpeg2 | y4mscaler -I active=704x360+0+60 -O sar=40:33 -O size=704x480 | mpeg2enc -f 8 -o output.m2v -E -10 -D 10 -4 1 -2 1 -q 4 ... Now for PAL, with it's different sample aspect ratio the numbers are slightly different. I'll spare you the boring arithmetic details but I think this is what would stand a good chance of working: mpeg2dec -o pgmpipe input.m2v | pgmtoy4m -a 59:54 -r 25:1 -i t -x 420mpeg2 | y4mscaler -I active=704x432+0+72 -O sar=118:81 -O size=704x576 | mpeg2enc -f 8 -o output.m2v -E -10 -D 10 -4 1 -2 1 -q 4 ... Personally I'd leave the data along and watch it letterboxed. The decision to toss away the extra lines has already been made and upscaling and re-encoding will degrade the image. Depending on how critical your viewing needs are the quality might be acceptable but I did not care for the results. Cheers, Steven Schultz ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ Mjpeg-users mailing list Mjpeg-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mjpeg-users