Video Quality

[Cosmichrist]

So, I've been using PC's for 20 plus years. I needed a quality photo editor, so a month or so ago, I bought the 27inch base Imac. The photos look great.

When I put one of my produced DVD's in, it looked horrible compared to my PC with a better video card, however nothing compares to my ps3. So I took my video and converted it to .mov and it looked better, but man, that's one huge file. I also realize that pc and I guess mac DVD players don't do as well as standalone players.

I'm a little lost on what format to use for my Imac video in full screen. Yes, I'm a mac noob, I admit it. :} I want my imac video to look as good as my mpeg2 video on my pc. My PC has a 300 dollar video card in it, and I know it that helps, but I was hoping to get close with the Imac.

Thanks in advance for your assistance to a mac noob.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I suppose you don't have a monitor with 2560 x 1440 pixel connected to the Windows PC?

Anyway, no need to create a .mov file for DVD viewing, as you probably used some kind of older or some video editing codec.
Have you tried Handbrake yet?

How to backup/copy/rip video DVDs to your HDD and transcode them to another format in Mac OS X.

How-To: Automating DVD & Blu-Ray (Backup, Encoding & Tagging) for Mac OS X 10.6​

Helpful Information for Any Mac User by GGJstudios​

You could also try VLC Player to play back the video DVDs.

 

[mBox]

Pixel size....

Wouldnt it be the fact that your watching a DVD at 720x480 Non-square pixels on a iMac 2560x1440 Square pixels screen?

 

[arjen92]

Wouldnt it be the fact that your watching a DVD at 720x480 Non-square pixels on a iMac 2560x1440 Square pixels screen?

Yes, and the playstation upscales your content so it fits better on your hd screen. Although, of course it's not real HD. Your mac (and pc) do not do this.

 

[KeithPratt]

When I put one of my produced DVD's in, it looked horrible compared to my PC with a better video card, however nothing compares to my ps3. So I took my video and converted it to .mov and it looked better, but man, that's one huge file. I also realize that pc and I guess mac DVD players don't do as well as standalone players.

Transcoding can't make an image look better, and a basic video card will play DVD video as well as a super-duper expensive one. So this is very likely a playback settings issue.

I'm going to take a punt: turn deinterlacing off in the 'Video' menu in DVD Player.

If that doesn't work you'll have to describe the problem with the image in detail.

Yes, and the playstation upscales your content so it fits better on your hd screen. Although, of course it's not real HD. Your mac (and pc) do not do this.

Of course they do.

 

[Cosmichrist]

Thanks for the replies

I'm still learning the mac. These are all great pointers, I'll address each one. I kinda freaked out in the quality, but it appears I need to do more research.

Thank you.

 

[arjen92]

Of course they do.

As far as I know, computer players (that I know) only resize the image, not adding more pixels through calculations.

The PS3 doesn't just resize the video, it actually calculates where extra pixels should be to make it look more like real HD, it upscales, not resizes.

 

[KeithPratt]

As far as I know, computer players (that I know) only resize the image, not adding more pixels through calculations.

The PS3 doesn't just resize the video, it actually calculates where extra pixels should be to make it look more like real HD, it upscales, not resizes.

Upscaling is just resizing. Quicktime and DVD Player interpolate when upscaling, just as most modern software and hardware does. Quality varies.

 

[hvfsl]

Apple's DVD player app isn't as good as PowerDVD/WinDVD on the PC. You will get better video quality if you use something like VLC, but most likely still won't be as good as the PC. This is because Apple DVD player/Quicktime do a very poor job of de-interlacing video, they basically display the video at 30 frames/sec and then blur it. Where as PowerDVD/WinDVD will display it at 60 frames/sec, filling in the missing pixels providing a much sharper image. VLC can do this too, but PowerDVD/WinDVD do a lot of other stuff using your graphics card to help improve the video quality.

To get the best video quality on my Mac when watching DVDs/BluRays I generally reboot into Windows and use PowerDVD.