Comparing Digital Video Downloads of Interlaced TV Shows
It is scary how little effort seems to be going into video conversion/encoding at major players like iTunes, Netflix and Hulu. Amazon did a kind of okay job converting the source material properly, and only Microsoft did an excellent job. The NTSC DVDs still give you the maximum quality – but of course, if you watch them on an LCD, the burden of deinterlacing is on your side. Handbrake with “detelecine” (for the bulk of it) and “decomb” (for exceptions) turned on, and with a target framerate of “same as source” will generate a rather good MP4 video similar to Amazon’s, but without the judder.
Aside from Amazon’s 1080p via TiVo, I think I’d get better quality watching a DVD than most of the (non-BitTorrent) downloadable and streaming video that’s available, even when it’s so-called HD.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
Thank you for that wonderful link, Michael. Steil did a marvelous job. I bookmarked his blog after first reading that post, even though he'll probably never cover another topic I'm deeply interested in.
But I will quibble with this a bit:
"Aside from Amazon’s 1080p via TiVo, I think I’d get better quality watching a DVD than most of the (non-BitTorrent) downloadable and streaming video that’s available, even when it’s so-called HD."
While I agree that Amazon's TiVo VOD is in a class by itself, and while I agree there is a lot of low picture quality material out there via streams that is advertised as "HD", I'd still say that the small part of Netflix' catalog that is 720p gives you noticeably better quality PQ than a DVD would. (I'm not a customer of Apple's HD streams, but I'd suspect they also give you better PQ than a DVD would.)
