Video on PS3 looks so much better than on Mac. Why?

[sammich]

I know that it is almost an established fact that set top boxes will have nice algorithms to smooth out and make video crisp, but there was a time when I had to move from streaming from my Mac to using Plex directly on the TV with my Mac and the difference was like watching something with half the bitrate.

I was watching a 720p recording of the new Top Gear season when I needed to temporarily change. It honestly looked like I was watching some non-hd divx episodes of like The Office which is 40% of the BR.

So how come the software media players don't offer anything similar?

 

[fpnc]

I know that it is almost an established fact that set top boxes will have nice algorithms to smooth out and make video crisp, but there was a time when I had to move from streaming from my Mac to using Plex directly on the TV with my Mac and the difference was like watching something with half the bitrate.

I was watching a 720p recording of the new Top Gear season when I needed to temporarily change. It honestly looked like I was watching some non-hd divx episodes of like The Office which is 40% of the BR.

So how come the software media players don't offer anything similar?

Were there differences in the contrast and brightness? If so, it may have been caused by a gamma difference between Mac OS X and PCs/TVs. Mac standard gamma (at least prior to Snow Leopard) was lower than on PCs which meant that some video files looked washed-out and artifact ridden on the Mac but seemed much richer and "better" on other platforms. However, if you adjusted the gamma on the Mac to compensate for these differences then suddenly this same video looked fine on the Mac.