[MikeD]

I just downloaded the full Matrix Reloaded trailer and on my Cinema HD, on Full screen it looks GREAT and it's even better than DVD's look at full screen/widescreen. Almost as though the DVD's are duller and or interlaced.. not quite sure but over all, DVD's just aren't as clear as this trailer was at full screen.. Any reason why?

[:haripu:]

the resolution is higher. a lot.

[Toyin]

Originally posted by :haripu::
the resolution is higher. a lot.

Is that true? The largest trailers I've seen are 640 x 480. I know for sure that some of my DVDs play at 1080 lines interlaced and most at 720 lines progressive (on HDTV).

I've always thought that Apple's DVD player sucks. It didn't bother me when I had a desktop, but now that I've bought a 12" PB (and use the DVD much more) the interlaced video is pretty obvious.

Here's hoping that 10.3 improves this.

[JLL]

Originally posted by Toyin:
Is that true? The largest trailers I've seen are 640 x 480.

There is a hires version available.

I know for sure that some of my DVDs play at 1080 lines interlaced and most at 720 lines progressive (on HDTV).

The resolution on a 16:9 DVD is 720x480.

It didn't bother me when I had a desktop, but now that I've bought a 12" PB (and use the DVD much more) the interlaced video is pretty obvious.

That's because an LCD screen isn't interlaced.

[mosch]

DVD has a maximum vertical resolution of 480 lines, so you're not actually getting 720 or 1080 off of them.

[Toyin]

Originally posted by JLL:

That's because an LCD screen isn't interlaced.

Then I'd think that the lines we see shouldn't be there on an LCD screen, but I'd argue that there more obvious on the PB than on the 17" CRT.

Originally posted by mosch:
DVD has a maximum vertical resolution of 480 lines, so you're not actually getting 720 or 1080 off of them.

So exactly what does it mean when a DVD player can play a DVD at 720 progressive lines? Is it just extrapolating those lines and wouldn't that mean it's interlaced?

[JLL]

Originally posted by Toyin:
Then I'd think that the lines we see shouldn't be there on an LCD screen.

It means that they should be there.

Interlaced content consists of to half-pictures.

[a holck]

"Lines" refer to the amount of horizontal lines, thats lines going from left to right. In thotoshop that would be the height of the picture.

NTSC has 480 (720x480)

PAL has 576 (720x576)

HD has 1080 (1920x1080)

720p has 720 (1280x720)

[JLL]

Originally posted by a holck:
"Lines" refer to the amount of horizontal lines, thats lines going from left to right. In thotoshop that would be the height of the picture.

NTSC has 480 (720x480)

PAL has 576 (720x576)

HD has 1080 (1920x1080)

720p has 720 (1280x720)

When do you correct the error in your sig? I think it has been that way since MacNN started to use vBulletin

[phobos]

Progressive is not reffered to the lines but to the way somes televisions havdle the images. The progressive method gives a crisper and a more solid picture

[Toyin]

Originally posted by JLL:
It means that they should be there.

Interlaced content consists of to half-pictures.

Okay, so why do the lines exist on the CRT?

Originally posted by a holck:
"Lines" refer to the amount of horizontal lines, thats lines going from left to right. In thotoshop that would be the height of the picture.

NTSC has 480 (720x480)

PAL has 576 (720x576)

HD has 1080 (1920x1080)

720p has 720 (1280x720)

So every DVD is played at 480 lines? If so that's pretty amazing because watching DVD on my HDTV (especially SW episode2) is much, much sharper than on a 35" TV.

So bear with me. If I'm playing a DVD that's starts at 480 lines what is the DVD player sending to the HDTV?

[keston]

The highres/fullscreen matrix trailer is 1000x540 pixels. Alot more than DVD's 720x480 pixels.

[real]

There are no HD DVD's. Soon but not now. Sorry. It will be great for us HD owners but til then progessive scan for us.

[clarkgoble]

Actually there is a new version of I believe Terminator 2 which will include a version of the film for HDTV. You'll need a PC to play it. I don't recall the format it is using. It might be WMP9 which would suck for us Mac users. I'm hoping it is a more standard form of MPEG4, but knowing Microsoft...

I suspect this method of distribution will become more popular until the Motion Picture associations get off their asses and embrace HDTV. Right now PCs are driving it.

[Toyin]

Very informative posts. Here I thought I was getting 720 lines from DVDs on the TV

off topic: Just watched the Matrix trailer. Wow that looks real good. It's a good time to be a geek (Xmen-2, The Hulk, Matrix reloaded..etc)

[WJMoore]

I got the latest Matrix trailer 96Mb download it is 1000 odd pixels wide (can't check at the moment) and it plays like crap (video stutters) on my iMac. My friends also tried it on their laptops. One a PIII 750 and the other a P4 > 1Ghz both played crappy too. On my iMac the CPU wasn't maxed out so it wasn't a CPU issue. What would be causing it to playback poorly? BTW I got a smaller version as well and it plays beautifully.

[ARENA]

Originally posted by WJMoore:
I got the latest Matrix trailer 96Mb download it is 1000 odd pixels wide (can't check at the moment) and it plays like crap (video stutters) on my iMac. My friends also tried it on their laptops. One a PIII 750 and the other a P4 > 1Ghz both played crappy too. On my iMac the CPU wasn't maxed out so it wasn't a CPU issue. What would be causing it to playback poorly? BTW I got a smaller version as well and it plays beautifully.

I'm glad it plays perfectly in my TiBook

[a holck]

Originally posted by Toyin:
Okay, so why do the lines exist on the CRT?
So every DVD is played at 480 lines? If so that's pretty amazing because watching DVD on my HDTV (especially SW episode2) is much, much sharper than on a 35" TV.

So bear with me. If I'm playing a DVD that's starts at 480 lines what is the DVD player sending to the HDTV?

Regarding interlacing:
NTSC runs at a little under 30 fps (29.97)
This low frequency will strobe a lot to the eye.
So the NTSC designers chose an interlaced scanning order when the spec was formed to enhance the spatial (motion) resolution.
Basicly it means the the screen will be updated in two passes, both pases with half of the 480 lines.
First the even lines then the odd lines, and so forth.
Easc pass is called a field, two fields makes a frame.
As every pass will take 1/60 sec, the sample of each field will be offset 1/60 sec apart in time.
The result is an apperant framerate of 60 fps, using the same bandwith as 30 fps.
The linefequency is still 15khz.
This is important because the signal is ment to be broadcasted over radiowaves which have limited bandwith.
The drawback is a slightly flickering picture.

On Computermonitors which contains many smal details, the interlacing effect would cause the user to get headached because of the flickering efffect.
Therfore computers quickly adopted a progressive scanning order where the whole picture is drawn in one pass, and at a higher rate because bandwith is not a problem for this application.
The VGA standard used a frame size of 640x480 at 60 Hz progressive with a linefrequency of 30khz
This evolved over a decade to the commen resolutions of today, like 1280x1020 at 85 Hz

When you want to show a motion picture which runs at 24fps on a 60i system, you use something called a 2:3 pulldown to convert between them.
The difference between 24fps and 30fps is 6 frames or on a 60i display 12 fields.
The trick here repeat some of the image date across the fields, but at an even rate to prevent motion studdering.
The 2:3 represents the scanning pattern of the 24 frames like this:

Frame 1 will show for two fields. even and odd = 1 frame.

Frame 2 will show for three fields. even odd even = 1,5 frames

Frame 3 will show for two fields. even and odd = 1 frame.

Frame 4 will show for three fields. even odd even = 1,5 frames

When all 24 frames are scanned you will have used 60 fields to scan them, and the conversion is successfull.

When shown on a interlaced Tv-set this will look fluid.

When shown on a progressive monitor it will look like crap because both the fields of a given frame is shown at the same time, causing a torn and studdering picture.

The DVD standard supports both 29.97 fps and 24 fps.
If you encode the disc at 24 fps the quality will be much better because you have more data per frame, and because there is no interlacing information to make motion compression harder. Every frame represents a film frame.

When doing the DA conversion on output of the DVD player a built in circuit will introduce the 2:3 pulldown to get to standard 60i NTSC rate.

A progressive DVD player will not do that 2:3 pulldown. It will deliver a 24 fps stream to the HD tv-set.

The HD set contains a small video DSP that will remove 2:3 pulldown it detects it, and clean and rescale all Ntsc resolution material to the native Set format (1280x720)

[power142]

Originally posted by Toyin:
So every DVD is played at 480 lines? If so that's pretty amazing because watching DVD on my HDTV (especially SW episode2) is much, much sharper than on a 35" TV.

So bear with me. If I'm playing a DVD that's starts at 480 lines what is the DVD player sending to the HDTV?

In simple terms, a HDTV is much like a high resolution monitor, and 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i are just different modes they can accept as input.

The DVD player is sending 720x480 interlaced or progressive scan to the TV, and then the TV is pulling some tricks to up-convert the image to something higher. If you have a HDTV set, the TV is doing exactly the same while watching regular broadcast/cable, unless you have a HDTV decoder and your receiving a program in HD......

DVDs generally look good because the image is stable and often of good quality, so the results look quite impressive when it is (effectively) scaled up to HDTV resolution. Compare this to scaling an image in photoshop when the source image is low resolution, or of low quality - the results you get are much less satisfactory than when you start with a better image.

However, these results pale in comparison to a decent HD signal

[Mike S.]

Originally posted by clarkgoble:
Actually there is a new version of I believe Terminator 2 which will include a version of the film for HDTV. You'll need a PC to play it. I don't recall the format it is using. It might be WMP9 which would suck for us Mac users. I'm hoping it is a more standard form of MPEG4, but knowing Microsoft...

It is indeed Windows Media 9 and I imagine many (most?) PC users will be left out as well because MS is claiming it's going to need at least a 1.8 Ghz CPU to play smoothly.

Mac users may as well forget it, Microsoft doesn't even let Mac browsers in to see the page about the format, not even IE. They're blocking all Win browsers but IE as well.

The demo movies are apparently distributed as .exe (according to a /. talkback poster)

Can't get much more Windows only that that set up and Microsoft is pushing this thing for use in set-tops and DVD players.

It would really suck if the industry adopts this nonsense.

[Mike S.]

Originally posted by WJMoore:
I got the latest Matrix trailer 96Mb download it is 1000 odd pixels wide (can't check at the moment) and it plays like crap (video stutters) on my iMac. My friends also tried it on their laptops. One a PIII 750 and the other a P4 > 1Ghz both played crappy too.

I played it on a 700 Mhz eMac combo drive model in Fullscreen and aside from some lipsync issues it played well with few dropped frames that I noticed.

QT Player IDed it as an MPEG4 file, I didn't see that mentioned anywhery; sorry if that's common knowledge.

[JLL]

It's too bad that we don't have anything like HDTV in Europe.

Why can't they agree on a world wide TV standard?

[Lew]

Originally posted by a holck:
"Lines" refer to the amount of horizontal lines, thats lines going from left to right. In thotoshop that would be the height of the picture.

NTSC has 480 (720x480)

PAL has 576 (720x576)

HD has 1080 (1920x1080)

720p has 720 (1280x720)

And widescreen PAL TVs are 1024x576

[V0ID]

Originally posted by WJMoore:
I got the latest Matrix trailer 96Mb download it is 1000 odd pixels wide (can't check at the moment) and it plays like crap (video stutters) on my iMac. My friends also tried it on their laptops. One a PIII 750 and the other a P4 > 1Ghz both played crappy too. On my iMac the CPU wasn't maxed out so it wasn't a CPU issue. What would be causing it to playback poorly? BTW I got a smaller version as well and it plays beautifully.

Probably bus frequency.

[OwlBoy]

Though you have to admit, 100x500 is a bit high for compressed web content

-Owl

[Lew]

Originally posted by JLL:
It's too bad that we don't have anything like HDTV in Europe.

Why can't they agree on a world wide TV standard?

This page may provide some answers. Looks like Europe is going via the route of getting people used to 16:9 SDTV (hence the fact that I can get a 28" widescreen TV for as little as £200 now) before eventually phasing in HDTV.

[EDIT] This page has some good info, too.

Given the apparently positive attitudes to HDTV amongst North American consumers, is it really true that European consumers are not interested in HDTV? When members of the public have seen demonstrations of HDTV pictures, they are almost universally impressed. However, if you ask individuals to explain why they like HDTV, their first unprompted response is often that they like the shape of the picture (16:9). Why go to the trouble and expense of HDTV if you can get much of the benefit from wide-screen SDTV?

[LightWaver-67]

Hmmmm... No one mentioned here the fact that (I believe) MPEG-2 is MUCH more compressed (in general) to fit the video source on a DVD. I'm fairly sure that the High-Res clip you're viewing would be a MUCH smaller file-size if it were resized to the appropriate NTSC resolution... compressed down to a .m2v file... and played-back through an optical device with limited bit-rates.

I 'think' they use Sorensen for most of the movie trailers... am I right...?

[JLL]

Originally posted by GFive:
[EDIT] This page has some good info, too.

That quote is five years old when people were still watching crappy VHS movies.

[Lew]

Originally posted by JLL:
That quote is five years old when people were still watching crappy VHS movies.

So it's a 5 year old quote? Like, from around the time when Europe started digital TV broadcasting? Seems quite relevant to me then

It explains some of the decisions behind the current TV situation here and why we have no HDTV but we do have 16:9 format TVs. HDTVs in the US are still hideously expensive compared to 16:9 SDTVs in Europe. When the decision is made to start broadcasting in HD over here then the technology will have come down to more affordable prices meaning an easier transition for consumers. Also, with the move to 16:9 SDTVs people will already be used to the aspect ratio and there should be a good selection of programming already available in 16:9 format.

[MikeD]

Just to confirm the Resolution issue of this trailer:

On my 12" PB, it skipped on battery power (probably because of my power settings - processor reduced) as I plugged it in and it played fine. And it works GREAT on my powermac and HD display.. I wish all DVD's were now HD! And I wish I had a REAL HDTV out in my living room!!

Mike

[Toyin]

thanx power 142 and a holck I've read these explanations before but your explanations gave me a clearer picture.

[Eug]

Most DVDs are not optimal quality, even if they are at full 16:9 anamorphic resolution.

It would be best to compare to one of those SuperBit movies. The detail is higher in those since they use dual layer discs and cut out all the extras. All the freed-up space goes to maximizing video quality.

The trailer is higher resolution, but at least with an optimal quality DVD, the difference in quality would be less.

[coolmacdude]

Originally posted by Eug:
Most DVDs are not optimal quality, even if they are at full 16:9 anamorphic resolution.

However, at least now most store the video in 24 fps progressive format so you can get the best possible viewing experience based on your equipment.

[WJMoore]

Originally posted by ARENA:
I'm glad it plays perfectly in my TiBook

That's interesting because my iMac matches or outspecs a 1Ghz TiBook except for level 3 cache and the amount of RAM... maybe it's a RAM thing.

Originally posted by Mike S.:
I played it on a 700 Mhz eMac combo drive model in Fullscreen and aside from some lipsync issues it played well with few dropped frames that I noticed.

QT Player IDed it as an MPEG4 file, I didn't see that mentioned anywhery; sorry if that's common knowledge.

What happens if you play it windowed in QuickTime player? How mauch RAM do you have?

Originally posted by V0ID:
Probably bus frequency.

An eMac has a slower bus and SDRAM. A TiBook has the same bus frequency... By all observations here the iMac should play it no worries... strange. I'll have to find that AppleScript to play it fullscreen and see what happens.

Edit: Found it

Code:
on open fileName
   tell application "QuickTime Player"
       open fileName
       present movie 1
   end tell
end open

Wesley

[WJMoore]

Got around to trying it out fullscreen today. It played flawlessly in all its widescreen glory on the iMac once it was presenteed fullscreen . iBook still struggles though - dropped frames, no real surprises there though. After I played it fullscreen on the iMac I hit play just for the hell of it and it played flawlessly windowed... Very strange, something must have been upsetting it the other day when i tried. Not to worry, I'm happy now.

Wesley

[klinux]

The T2: Limited Edition DVD will include a HD stream that is encoded using the WMV 9 Pro codec. It will be a 1920 x 1080 progressive stream with Dolby EX 5.1 audio. That is mighty impressive.

You may or may not like Micrsoft but IMO, it deserves credit for creating this technology showcase.

Now, even if I have a CPU that is powerful enough to process this, my wonderful 21" Trinitron CRT that is solid at 1800x1440 @ 80HZ is still useless.

[klinux]

The HD version of the trailer was not watchable (too many skipped frame) on my iBook 700 with 384 MB RAM. The 640 res trailer played fine though.

[mrtew]

I love that hi-res trailer even thought I am not really a Matrix fan, because I am a true trailer collector (not trailer trash!) and am blown away by the picture quality. Are there any other big trailers around? The second biggest one I have is for the new Charlies Angels movie and while it looks great at 720x480, way bigger than most previews, it's not even close to the Matrix.