10 replies to this topic

[RoxioFan]

Hi, I really don't understand : Blu-ray video quality is MUCH better on my PC than on my PS3 or my standalone BD Player !  

I have noticed that it's the DARK scenes that render very bad on my PS3 and BDplayer : it's as if there were "sand" on the image, it's very unpleasant. However when I play the same video on my PC, the image is near perfect, no "sand" effect.

What's weird is that when the video scene is in plain daylight, video quality is as perfect on my PC as on my PS3 & BDplayer.

I know that it's not a problem of TV Screen because I tried to plug my Full HD screen to my PC, and the result was the same.

Is anyone else experiencing the same problem ?

Why is Blu-ray playback so much better on PC than on a PS3 / BD Player ?



PS : The video players I use on my PC are Windows Media Player and VLC
PPS : My stand alone BD Players are the PS3 and the Panasonic DMP-BD10A with the latest firmwares.

[RoxioFan]

Here is what I call "sand" :

http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd-tv.jpg (Screenshot from a blu-ray movie playing on my PS3)

But everything is ok on my PC :

http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd-pc.jpg (Screenshot from the same blu-ray movie playing on my PC w/ Windows Media Player)

(sorry for the contrast but it's a dark scene from a movie)

[shueardm]

The blacks look very poor on your PC where they look great on your HDTV. This means that the mess is more pronounced over the better blacks. I'd say you have a very bad encode or your source material is bad, what you see on your PC is exactly the same but less noticable- your HDTV is showing you the faults in your video.

[RoxioFan]

The blacks look very poor on your PC where they look great on your HDTV. This means that the mess is more pronounced over the better blacks. I'd say you have a very bad encode or your source material is bad, what you see on your PC is exactly the same but less noticable- your HDTV is showing you the faults in your video.

Thanks for your reply shueardm.

Maybe you have the feeling that the blacks look better on my HDTV than on my PC monitor just because my TV is bigger.

To see it more clearly, I have linked my HDTV to my PC so that you can see the difference :

1/ The Blu-ray video is playing on my PC, and the PC is linked to my HDTV
http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd1-pc.jpg
http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd2-pc.jpg

2/ The Blu-ray video is playing on my PS3, and the PS3 is linked to my HDTV
http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd1-ps3.jpg
http://www.lehit.com/temp/bd2-ps3.jpg

To me, the image provided by my PC (using Windows Media Player) is much better than the one I get from my PS3.

We can see that the problem is in the darks , but when the scene is in plain daylight the image is nearly the same on my PS3 as on my PC.

My explanation is that my graphics card (a high-end geForce 8800gtx) makes the blacks "smoother" and therefore avoid the "sandy" image I can see on the PS3.

What do you think about that ?

[shueardm]

It's very hard with screen grabs but i think that you still have a problem with the actuall video. It's quite evident even on the PC that the video is not clean.
Perhaps it might be something like a bad HDMI cable or something too, maybe a third playback device can tell you one way or the other.

[RoxioFan]

Perhaps it might be something like a bad HDMI cable or something too, maybe a third playback device can tell you one way or the other.

The image I get on my standalone BD Player (Panasonic DMP-BD10A) is the same as the one I get on my PS3 and the HDMI cable is high quality ...

I will follow your advice and see if I can make a better encoding next time. Thanks again for your help !

[valkanela]

He is trying to tell you that your source video is bad. You know, if your source video was 600x400 and you encoded it in 1280x720 or whatever. It's impossible to make a good HD video from that, this can make only guys from CSI, but I don't believe them a lot. Next time you should encode some movie that is taped in HD resolution.

[RoxioFan]

He is trying to tell you that your source video is bad. You know, if your source video was 600x400 and you encoded it in 1280x720 or whatever. It's impossible to make a good HD video from that, this can make only guys from CSI, but I don't believe them a lot. Next time you should encode some movie that is taped in HD resolution.

The video was shot from an HD cam. It's 1080i native.

[shueardm]

Look at the second image of each of your tests. Look at the trees on the left and compare them. To me, in this shot the PS3 looks better. This clip happens to be in the daylight where the otherone is at night time.
Perhaps it's just a case of your camera is poor (like all consumer cameras) under low light conditions and it has used auto gain which brightens the image but degrades the image at the same time.
I'm still thinking it's the source.

[SS Scott]

umm, Windows Media Player can't play Blu-ray discs, can it?  what are you feeding WMP?  your raw source?  is your video then being transcoded for Blu-ray?

[RoxioFan]

I just right-click on a "m2ts" file, choose "open file", select "Windows Media Player", and it plays just fine
I can't tell you for sure which codec allows me to play such files because I have a lot of movie codecs installed on my PC.