[mythtv-users] Reference fanless frontend, frontend, backend, fe/be

[Andre]

On 14 Jan 2011, at 18:01, jedi wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:51:36AM -0500, Ronald Frazier wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Richard Morton
>> <richard.e.morton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I had an online discussion with someone (not on this list) that was
>>> being very patronising and abusive while telling me that hi is
>>> transcoding a bluray rip to 2gb (from 25gb) and it is completely
>>> lossless.
>> 
>> Completely lossess, certainly not. But I transcode all my blurays
>> rips, and most end up in the 2-4GB range, and it seems as good as
>> lossless to me. As far as the video, I've done back and forth
> 
>   Well. A lot of BluRays get bad or mediocre reviews in terms of
> video quality. Plus viewing distance can have a lot to do with how
> you might percieve the differences. 

And all modern video codecs are a kind of jedi mind trick (nothing personal ;) in that they remove the sorts of details most people don't notice or look for anyway.

All flat panel TVs add their own issues to the soup and it's possible that on _his TV_ there is no difference between a native bluray and the 2GB version!

Sadly (or happily, not sure which) I've been trained to spot such things, which means I end up spending a lot on AV gear and there's a lot of mumbling & muttering around here when the broadcasters push too far or screw up totally. It does mean I thoroughly appreciate things when it's done right, which does happen reasonably often.

There are significant artefacts on 25, 50 & 100Mb/s contribution grade feeds when you know what to look for! Helps if you've seen a few uncompressed feeds (1.5Gb/s HD-SDI) too, those are truly wondrous to watch on a decent monitor. Even the native Bluray rips, coming from digital cinema 2k source or a good 35mm print (the good ones) have significant artefacts, you won't catch me re-compressing blurays, I'd rather buy a bigger hard disk.

Getting back on topic I'm therefore a little sceptical about things like the ION and the GT210 and very suspicious of reports from people who think basic de-interlacing looks great! I'm coming to the conclusion that my GT220 isn't really up to the job on fast pans, but whether that's due to de-interlacing performance, vdpau code or myth code is difficult to know. I think I need to convince a less discerning friend to buy an ION2 and offer to "set it up" for them ;-)

I do know that the last year's worth of Myth development combined with the latest vdpau cards gives image quality that would have cost thousands to achieve at home just a few years ago.

Andre