Help in Encoding a movie into fullscreen instead of the normal one

[zx50]

decryptit, you have to resize the player no matter what because if it's widescreen then by the time you make it big enough for the top and bottom to reach the top, the film will be so big and CPU cosuming that your pc (or most pc's come to that) won't be able to handle it. Just resize the player, you have to, if you want to use the player to watch fullscreen. I suggest playing the video in windows media player 9 though for better picture quality and sound.

[MaximRecoil]

Originally posted by zx50
Eh? exc....excuse me, what ARE you on about, i have a 1024x768 resolution and my XviD/DivX video's play fine.

A 576x320 movie looks fine displayed on 1024x768 although it looks pretty small in the center of your screen and the small size is masking most of the errors. If you resize it to go larger the quality will suffer because to stretch the horizontal resolution to nearly double. You are watching through resizing filters at this point and it looks nothing but bad. Resizing filters can size down and look good but sizing up that much; there isn't a filter on earth that can look good doing that.

Btw i have just tried what you have advised, and i can see no quality improvement whatsoever, the only thing i can see though is the fact that because the resolution has been forced down, parts in scenes that had just the right amount of colour in them now have way too much and look ugly (i.e dark areas).

That is a problem with the quality of your movie files. You are used to seeing them small on a high res monitor and this hides problems to a point. Try it with a high quality file. If I get some time I will post some screenshot examples with a high quality 700 mb xvid.

[zx50]

What on earth are you going on about??????? i resize the player to fill my screen, and my encodes ARE 700mb. I resize with bicubic and what i watch is stunning quality. I don't know whether it's the way you encode or what but you have totally lost me on this one. I have never heard of anyone that does'nt resize the player that they watch their films on. In fact it's ridiculous, the whole point of having the bitrate high i.e 1000kbps+ is so that you can watch them in fullscreen mode. I watch my films through media player and i go to full screen with that. You have the totally wrong idea about wtahcing films. In fact you can have the bitrate as low as 630kbps and still be very watchable if not great quality. The only time that you get very poor quality is when you have the resolution under 352 then you might have problems, but seriously you are going the wrong way about watching films. XviD is'nt like the internet where you have to make do films the size of a postage stamp, you can now watch them in near DVD quality full screen. Try it you might be surprised. And if you have and the quality is'nt right then just find the right bitrate. You can have upto a 1:50mins film in great quality then after that you are looking at 2CD's.

P.S if you were'nt meant to resize the why do they have the resize button on all players for??

[MaximRecoil]

You are joking right? I guess you have just eliminated the need for HDTV material. We can just use low resolution stuff and stretch it with bicubic filters and it is just as good; in fact, it is "stunning quality". LOL @ that.

For best results, match the resolution of the video to the resolution of the monitor if you want a full screen. It is really that simple. If you think that watching any 700 mb full length movie file resized through bicubic filtering to nearly twice its horizontal resolution actually looks good then I don't know what to tell you. Take any picture in Photoshop sometime and resize it double and tell me it looks as good as the original.

[zx50]

Yes if you want PERFECT results, what you are on about is high definition, and there are'nt many people around who do them like that. Tell you what take your theory to divx.com and see what they have to say about it, it does'nt have to involve XviD just about the resizing, and see what responses you get. Again i agree with you on the fact that it will be PERFECT if you have it the same size as your monitor, but you don't have to have it like that even to want great quality. And seeing as though we are on this subject, what do you think the resolution is of DVD, i can tell you now it's 720x576 so are you going to tell me that's not stunning looking, and just in case you don't believe me try playing a vob (dvd file) and then check the playback properties. So really DVD is'nt the same resolution as my monitor either, it gets resized just like the encodes do, except the computer automatically resizes the DVD whereas the encodes have to be resized by us meaning the player. And don't think for one minute that even if an encode is the same size as your monitor that it's going to be the same as the DVD because it never will be, XviD is a lossy codec just like DivX.

P.S by the way the more bitrate that you add to the film (i.e well over 700mb) the more detail that you will have, because more bit's have been added to the film (did you think of that), so really you don't need to have a massive resolution that probably half the pc's can't even play, just 576x320 or 640x360 or maybe even 704x384 will do just fine.

[zx50]

Look this is starting to go off topic, it started off with you saying that if decryptit wanted to watch his film in fullscreen then it was best to lower the resolution on his monitor, and that's not true. All that needed to be said was just make the player go to fullscreen that's all. I don't want to start talking about high definition, just wanted to say that, that's all. It's not very good advice to give someone who wants to watch their film in fullscreen, i would have just told them to click the full screen button on their player. If you think high definition is great then what you should have maybe said was told them about playing their films using the full screen button, but i think you would be better watching them in high defintition, then that way they would know that reducing the resolution on the monitor was'nt the only way to watch films.

P.S i encoded an episode 704x384 and it was that good that i would have been prepared to get rid of the DVD that it was took from, iand beleive me i do not take cr*p at all. I'm not saying that could replace HD just that 700mb could look great. And btw you can't compare an image from photoshop with a film, the codec knows exactly where to put bit's in the frame so when it's stretched quality won't be affected, i think the programmers had this in mind when writing XviD.

[MaximRecoil]

Yes if you want PERFECT results, what you are on about is high definition, and there are'nt many people around who do them like that. Tell you what take your theory to divx.com and see what they have to say about it, it does'nt have to involve XviD just about the resizing, and see what responses you get.

It is not exactly a theory. It is common knowledge that the best results will come from having your monitor be as close in resolution to your video's resolution as possible. Of course you are only going to get out what you put in and apparently seeing your files up close and personal in their proper screen filling resolution didn't set well with you.

Again i agree with you on the fact that it will be PERFECT if you have it the same size as your monitor, but you don't have to have it like that even to want great quality. And seeing as though we are on this subject, what do you think the resolution is of DVD, i can tell you now it's 720x576 so are you going to tell me that's not stunning looking, and just in case you don't believe me try playing a vob (dvd file) and then check the playback properties. So really DVD is'nt the same resolution as my monitor either, it gets resized just like the encodes do, except the computer automatically resizes the DVD whereas the encodes have to be resized by us meaning the player.

I run 800x600 resolution when watching DVD's so very little resizing is needed. The more you have to resize an image the worse it gets. If your high screen resolution and media player resizing filters are masking errors in your files then by all means, keep using them. Have you tried a DVD at 640x480? It looks great even though it has to size down a little bit (sizing down always looks better than sizing up).

P.S by the way the more bitrate that you add to the film (i.e well over 700mb) the more detail that you will have, because more bit's have been added to the film (did you think of that), so really you don't need to have a massive resolution that probably half the pc's can't even play, just 576x320 or 640x360 or maybe even 704x384 will do just fine.

I'm not sure what you are trying to get at. I know very well that a higher bitrate results in higher quality files as a general rule. Have I said anything to the contrary? Maybe you should have used a higher bitrate on your files because you said they looked like crap when you set your PC's res to 640x480. Well it wasn't the resolution's fault, it was your file's fault. What you were seeing on your screen was the real thing up close, unmasked by massive resolutions and resizing filters. If your files look good at 640x480 then you know that you have done a good job encoding them because they have nothing to hide behind at that res.

[MaximRecoil]

Originally posted by zx50
Look this is starting to go off topic, it started off with you saying that if decryptit wanted to watch his film in fullscreen then it was best to lower the resolution on his monitor, and that's not true. All that needed to be said was just make the player go to fullscreen that's all. I don't want to start talking about high definition, just wanted to say that, that's all. It's not very good advice to give someone who wants to watch their film in fullscreen, i would have just told them to click the full screen button on their player.

Are you kidding? Where do you think he got the idea that he wanted his movies to fill the screen? What do you want to bet that he got that silly notion from watching good old fashioned television? You know how they make the broadcast come up fullscreen? They make the res fit the res of a standard TV (interlacing notwithstanding but that is the general idea). This is also how they make arcade games fill the screen on an arcade monitor. You ever play Mortal Kombat in the arcade? Looks pretty good doesn't it? That game had a resolution of 400x256 and yet it filled the whole 25" screen. How do you suppose they did that? It wasn't by feeding it to a 1024x780 monitor and stretching it I can assure you. Arcade games get their great picture quality from having a pure RGB connection and a monitor that matches the res of the game. So, again; if you want a 1.33:1 fullscreen video, the best way to do it (as long as you are going to make it high quality) is to encode it at 640x480 and set your PC to 640x480 when you watch it.

[zx50]

Right, i really don't want to carry this thread on and on, but all i'm gonna say is this, i've played DVD's on my pc and had the resolution in the software set to my pc resolution 1024x768 and the picture quality was better, don't ask me how just was. And i did'nt say that the picture was crap at all when i reduced the resolution, what i mean was when i reduced the resolution the picture was being squashed that much that the colours were being squashed again i.e dark areas and when i say dark areas i don't mean solid dark areas, like for instance there's a scene where you can see someones face and at the top right you can see scalp through their hair (because their head was shaved) but when reducing the resolution it just all turned black and could'nt watch it. All the way through the film all the parts that had lovely detail were just nearly black, so i just decided to up the resolution and i was back to the way i liked it. I might agree with you on one thing, the fact that if i had an actual 640x480 then it might look perfect, no doubt about it, but as far as reducing the resolution on the monitor no way. But anyway that's just my feeling's on the matter. I think we both have different opinions on what is suppose to be and what is not supposed to be and what looks better and what does'nt look better, i'm just gonna leave it here now.

P.S i still say that your the only one i have spoke to who thinks this way.

[MaximRecoil]

i mean was when i reduced the resolution the picture was being squashed that much that the colours were being squashed again i.e dark areas and when i say dark areas i don't mean solid dark areas, like for instance there's a scene where you can see someones face and at the top right you can see scalp through their hair (because their head was shaved) but when reducing the resolution it just all turned black and could'nt watch it. All the way through the film all the parts that had lovely detail were just nearly black, so i just decided to up the resolution and i was back to the way i liked it.

That is interesting; I couldn't tell you why that happened on your PC but that is not the way it is supposed to work. I wonder, does your video card support low resolutions like 640x480 with at least 24 bit color (I run it with 32 bit color myself)? Your card might have defaulted to a low color setting when you went to the low resolution.

On my PC if I am running a video with 640 horizontal resolution and I switch to 640x480 resolution on my PC I get a perfect image that fills the screen horizontally. It looks the same as when you hit the fullscreen button on your media player while running a high res except the picture is completely clean without the visual effects of hardware stretching and filters. It works fine for all common Xvid resolutions but it works the best if you have a video with 640 horizontal resolution because you get fullscreen that way with no stretch/filter. The vertical resolution doesn't really matter because that is just filled in with black bars like usual if it doesn't take up the whole 480 lines available.

If something went wrong when you tried it then I can see why you wouldn't like the idea. You would have to see it when it is working right and then judge I suppose.

[zx50]

Ah well, did forget to tell you this, my monitor does'nt support 640x480 the least i can go is 800xXXX but i can have 24bit or 32bit. But still even though i did'nt have the resolution the same it should have improved and it did'nt. But anyway what would the world be like if people just started to agree on everything. Really when i think about it this is'nt a case of who's right or wrong just a case of one likes something different than the other. I mean, i know people on the divx.com site who have resolutions beyond mine and they have their films less than mine, and they watch their films like me.