Remote Drive Access?

[blade]

Originally Posted by mike1961

For me, if I'm just watching a movie where people are talking to each other (and it's not some rock concert) why do I care if it's in dolby?........

.........So again, I'm just a little confused as to why sound is so very important if you are just listening to people talking to each other when watching a DVD.

Surround sound is more important for movies than for music. It places the sounds of the action in the correct location. For example if a car drives behind the character you'll hear the sound behind you. Surround sound is about the placement of sound.

At a rock concert the musicians are in front of you. Sound coming out of 2 stereo speakers places the sound in the right location. There really isn't a need to have the sound come from behind you unless you want to experience the concert as if your back were to the stage. Actually you'd hear the crowd noise in your rear speakers, which might make you feel a little more like you were there.

I know my description isn't very technical, but that's roughly the logic behind the use of surround sound. BTW I just use my TV's speakers as well. I'd love to have a "media room" where I could set everything up like some of the guys here have. Maybe one of these days I'll have an extra room that's well suited for that purpose.

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by mike1961

So again, I'm just a little confused as to why sound is so very important if you are just listening to people talking to each other when watching a DVD.

I think the point here is that Sage offers an easy, no-compromise solution for housing and playing back a DVD collection. You are not limited to the VHS standard of 480i video and stereo audio. Your viewing experience with Sage and remote storage will be identical to local playback from the physical ROM medium.

[mike1961]

I just got a Plasma 42" TV and the DVD's that I converted to MP4 files with an average file size of 240 mb/hour look great. I cannot tell any difference. As far as audio goes, I use the speakers from the TV so I don't notice any of the dolby problems mentioned in a prior reply but maybe there's something I'm not listening for. In any event, the video looks really clean. One advantage of mp4 over DVD files (aside from the obvious disk savings) although probably not too important is that it also creates less network traffic.

Mike

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mike1961

I just got a Plasma 42" TV and the DVD's that I converted to MP4 files with an average file size of 240 mb/hour look great. I cannot tell any difference.

I suppose that's a good thing, it would suck to have to re-compress them all

As far as audio goes, I use the speakers from the TV so I don't notice any of the dolby problems mentioned in a prior reply but maybe there's something I'm not listening for.

You're already losing 5.1 by using TV speakers. Those using a full 5.1/7.1 system would notice it.

In any event, the video looks really clean. One advantage of mp4 over DVD files (aside from the obvious disk savings) although probably not too important is that it also creates less network traffic.

You're right, even the 20Mbps of HD is not a problem for even a 100Mbps network

Anyway, the issue is not if it's right or wrong to recompress DVDs, it's that when recompressing them, especially to the ~250Mb/hr size, that there are some compromises that are made that need to be acknowledged. For you those sacrifices are negligible. For me they're significant.

[mike1961]

Stanger, you'r right when you said:

Originally Posted by stanger89

Anyway, the issue is not if it's right or wrong to recompress DVDs, it's that when recompressing them, especially to the ~250Mb/hr size, that there are some compromises that are made that need to be acknowledged. For you those sacrifices are negligible. For me they're significant.

Agreed, the issue here is not right/wrong and compromises are made. But if the compromises you noticed are mostly audio I'm still confused as to why these compromises are huge for you. In other words, you said you are using only the TV speakers also. If I understood your post about the surround effect being lost then am I correct in assuming this surround sound effect is also lost unless you have like 6 speakers or so placed all around the room? In other words, wouldn't the surround sound effect be lost when watching out of the TV speakers, or even two speakers since there are not multiple speakers placed throughout the room? I'm just trying to educate myself here and understand if the effect is huge for you because at some point in the future you may want to have many speakers placed throughout the room.

Thanks,
Mike

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Agreed, the issue here is not right/wrong and compromises are made. But if the compromises you noticed are mostly audio I'm still confused as to why these compromises are huge for you.

I'd actually say it's about even, the macroblocking at 500kbps is unacceptable to me, but so is the loss of multichannel audio.

The reason the audio compromise is so big is:

I have a setup like this:


With DVD I get audio like this:

which could be extracted to this with a software upgrade to my processor:


If I convert to AVC via Nero Recode, I'm essentailly stuck with:
drat! They don't have a good stereo graphic. But anyway, I'm stuck with stereo because Nero Recode only supports AAC audio, which is not supported by (any really) consumer electronics processors.

In other words, you said you are using only the TV speakers also.

If I did, I mis-typed

If I understood your post about the surround effect being lost then am I correct in assuming this surround sound effect is also lost unless you have like 6 speakers or so placed all around the room?

For the most part, yes.

In other words, wouldn't the surround sound effect be lost when watching out of the TV speakers, or even two speakers since there are not multiple speakers placed throughout the room?

Like I said for you (maybe that's where you thought I said I had TV speakers), you're not losing anything, but for me I lose 4 channels of discrete audio.

I'm just trying to educate myself here and understand if the effect is huge for you because at some point in the future you may want to have many speakers placed throughout the room.

Yes surround sound makes a truely huge difference. Of course it's not totally lost, if you have recode downconvert to stereo, you can extract surround from that stereo with something like DPL IIx, but it's not quite the same as the original.

[stanger89]

I figure I'll continue it here, rather than crash another thread.

Mike you asked about macroblocking and such, here are some examples. What I did was to encode a chunk of SW III (the beginning of Chapter 3) into two mp4 files, one at "Standard - AVC" set to 500kbps, and the next at 2Mbps (for comparison).

I then, in avisynth croped each to 1/3 of a frame along with the direct DVD source and stackhorizontal'd them into one video file. Of note I also use lanczos4resize to tweak the size of the 500kbps (which was 640x272 out of recode) and the AR of the DVD to match the 720x304 size of the 2Mbps recode clip.

Order is this:

500kbps......................................2Mbps........................................Original(4-8Mbps)


First thing to notice is the weird contouring on the 500kbps part. There's definitely macroblocking but I believe also false contouring and a significant loss of detail. You'll notice the 2Mbps is very close to the original, but then it's only about half the size.



Here's another example, note the blocking on the left "wing" of the destroyer.



Here's a good one, look at the smoke, there's obvious blocking in it, it has a kind of "patchwork" look to it, where it's made up of solid color blocks instead of smooth gradients.



One last example, again notice the blocking on the left side, as well as the loss of detail. Actually when this is in motion, there's a hint of blocking in the 2Mbps section as well I think, but it's subtle.

It's still amazing what can be done with a mere 500kbps (half my DLS upstream ), but to use a common term from HD optical discussion, you can't hit transparency at that bitrate, and for me, nothing short of tranparency is acceptable, especially not with the time involved in re-encoding.

Oh, and if you're wondering where the last post of mine went, I had this about typed up but then realized I had some ffdshow "interference" on the AVC parts so I decided to scrap those shots and start over.

[mike1961]

Your graphical detail is very interesting and I think it's great that Sage allows us to choose our preferences. I'm certainly open to debate since it is friendly in nature. It seems that you have taken a single screen shot if I'm corrected and compared them. All I can say is that when I'm watching them in real time at some 30 frames per second, it looks very close to the original and I certainly cannot notice any differences (but I'll bet my wife might be able to because she's a lot more visual than I am and notices details).

Each person can try it and see. It may also depend on the movie one is encoding. Fast animation could be propped up to a higher mp4 bitrate. Try 750 or 900 and see how it compares since you will still get great compression even at those rates. Most movies don't have fast animation but for those that do you can always prop up the bitrate and try it. I personally don't need to capture single frames but rather I just watch the movie and look at it and see if it is acceptable.

Mike

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Your graphical detail is very interesting and I think it's great that Sage allows us to choose our preferences. I'm certainly open to debate since it is friendly in nature.

Good, I've probably been known to carry on debates past the point of being enjoyable

It seems that you have taken a single screen shot if I'm corrected and compared them.

As I said above, I encoded two AVC clips, one at 500kbps the other at 2Mbps. Originally I viewd them both (in motion) on my FP (post before the screenshots), but for the last post, I did the same thing but stacked them into a single video with AVISynth. Here's the clip if you want to look, it's encoded at 4Mbps AVC, which should be close to transparent at this frame size.

http://users.mcleodusa.net/r/ratpac/compare 4Mbps.mp4

For reference, the original (DVD) clip averages around 6Mbps with dips down to 3-4 and peaks up to about 9Mbps.

All I can say is that when I'm watching them in real time at some 30 frames per second, it looks very close to the original and I certainly cannot notice any differences (but I'll bet my wife might be able to because she's a lot more visual than I am and notices details).

It's harder to tell without a side by side, and definitely would be hard if your reference wasn't essentially perfect to start with.

Each person can try it and see.

As well they should.

It may also depend on the movie one is encoding. Fast animation could be propped up to a higher mp4 bitrate.

Oh, it very much depends on the content, you can see that clearly in the clip I posted, in some places the 500kbps is very close to the origninal, but in the more dynamic places you can see the compression falls apart.

Try 750 or 900 and see how it compares since you will still get great compression even at those rates.[/QUOTE]

As I said before, it would just take way too much effort for me. To do it right (which for me means retaining chapters, and original DD/DTS audio) would require me to go through a much more involved process than Nero Recode.

On top of that, anything under 3-4Mbps would probably show artifacts on my setup which it not acceptable, and at that rate I get at best a 50% reduction in size. For those sizes we're still talking needing a storage array.

That plus the last, and one of the biggest things (up there with audio) is if I went through all that effort, I would have to use an app other than Sage to view them.

There's just too many negatives for me to bother with transcoding, not to mention it would take me the better part of a year to transcode my 300 DVDs.

[stanger89]

FYI, today MS released WMP 11 with WM9 Advanced Profile, MS' implimentation of SMPTE 421M, VC-1 Advanced Profile:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...47#post7673747

VC-1 AP is the codec being used by all US HD DVD releases, and according to the posts on AVS, it sounds comparable (if not better) efficiency and quality wise to H.264.

Plus, Sage support WMV directly