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Posted by Bill's News on 08/04/06 16:02
Bill's News wrote:
> Bill's News wrote:
>> Alpha wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> I'm not expecting the OPPO to surpass playback quality from
>> the
>> PC, only to surpass that of the Buffalo LT which was
>> disappointing in comparison. Not to mention that neither the
>> Motorola nor the Buffalo resizes letterbox to 1920x1080 - an
>> irritation that may color other perceptions ;-0)
>
> Just arrived, 5 days ahead of Amazon's estimated arrival date.
>
> with DVI set to 1080i
>
> the first thing i compared was an xvid file converted from an
> MPEG2 capture via S-Video of a 1.8 letterbox digital channel,
> frame size 704x400, bit rate 2.192 mbps, converted with
> average
> motion scanning. I chose this because i had a copy on DVD and
> on the PC so I could toggle between them as they played the
> same
> scenes. The OPPO produces a perceptibly better image, I'd say
> as much as 10% better if I can adequately assign a value? And
> the PC outputs at 1080p.
an interlaced 640x480 xvid does not appear as smooth as it did
using the Buffalo LT and is not as smooth as playback via the
PC. If I zoom this image to 1.2 x or more on the OPPO the
interlace artifacts become extreme with any motion, even the
turn of a head.
I have to retract the following observations, I'm in error. The
DVD I had chosen is letterbox 1.8 and when it appeared on screen
as if it were 2.25 I didn't observe any scenes long enough to
notice that the OPPO, like every other crap player, merely
stretches the letterboxed frame to full width and makes no
adjustment in height. Even using the lowest HD upscaling of
540p produces the same result on the 1080 screen. Oddly, when
zooming this sort of distorted image the OPPO continues to
expand in this warped ratio. To date, the only players I've
used which handle this properly are VLC Media player and a VB6
program I wrote myself to call the WMP API. This is not rocket
science!
>
> Next a DVD which is also letterbox at 2:35 appeared better
> than
> the PC by a about the same value. This is further supported
> by
> zooming the image to 1.8 in which case the image quality was
> pretty much undisturbed on the OPPO while this is not the case
> on the PC.
>
> In addition to the improved picture quality the OPPO player's
> scaling strategy is considerably smarter than the Buffalo LT,
> in
> that letterbox 640x480 is properly displayed on a 1920x1080
> display AND zooming works properly in addition.
These observations remain true.
> Another nice
> feature of the zoom is that fast-forward or chapter navigation
> does not reset it, rather the setting remains and speeded play
> appears in the zoomed state. I haven't tested layer change
> yet,
> which always caused the Buffalo to reset.
>
> OPPO's Xvid fast forward is superb compared when with the PC
> and
> especially with the Buffalo. One difference between OPPO and
> Buffalo is that the OPPO reads navigation data when loading
> the
> file, the Buffalo only at first navigation request - however
> the
> OPPO's data collection is much quicker than the Buffalo giving
> it two thumbs up.
>
This statement, while still true, is dampened by the poor
letterbox performance.
> The OPPO is definitely a keeper
>
> BTW, setting DVI to each of 540, 720, and 1080 produces a
> perceptible quality change here on a 1920x1080p monitor.
> Matching the native resolution is the only way to go with this
> pairing.
>
> The next time one of the HD movie channels presents a film
> which
> I have on DVD I'll compare them. I've always had the feeling
> that cable channel HD movies are just DVD quality scaled up.
> I
> suppose, if that's true, that it will change now that HD
> mastering for BR & HD DVD has started?
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