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05-17-2007, 12:08 AM
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lordsmurf lordsmurf is online now
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I've watched the "download scene" since the very first animated GIFs were being passed off as movies. I remember watching GL movies in DOS. So I'm not new to any of this, I've followed online video since its infancy. Even to this day, downloads are wholly inferior to your own tv recordings.

There are times when a good download can be almost as good as a tv recording (especially if you're not using the best equipment to capture/record at home). These tend to be far and few between.

Why is it that Europeans (British especially) seem to be the only ones that can make a decent XVID "download" encode?

Right now I'm getting Doctor Who episodes, XVID files, as they air. The files are pretty close to perfect, no encode flaws, no over-compression, no audio errors, no sync problems, etc.

Americans and to a lesser degree Canadians, seem to screw everything up. Australians do a pretty cruddy job too, somewhere between European and Canadian quality. I can never find even one whole episode that does not have the overscan cropped, the video aspect wrong, the video over-filtered, the video with inadequate bitrate, or the audio with a sync problem. Given that 51% voted for Bush, I'm not surprised more than half of the files are fubar, but it's more than just half, it's nearly all of them!

Once in a great while, I find a decent copy of an episode.

I only look to downloads when the show I want to see is unavailable in the USA, and nobody in that country that I know can help with the recordings. A few times, I've looked to downloads of USA shows to getting episodes I'm missing.

Rarely does anything outside of Europe look good. I don't get it.

My rant for the day.

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  #2  
05-18-2007, 05:58 AM
markatisu markatisu is offline
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I think a lot of it has to do (at least for me) that British people get more HD feeds. It seems that anything that comes out on the BBC is in HD which makes it much easier to encode to an avi.

The US is starting to get there but you have these assclowns who crop it when all they need to do is seriously record the show and put the right settings in to retain the proper aspect ratio. The quality of an HD broadcast is so high that it should be a snap to capture it and make a beautiful encode. Marcus knows first hand how nice HD avi's can look, as do I. Often times though especially with US people they botch it (as I said above, cropping and/or messing it up).

I think it comes down to laziness and cheapness (they dont use the right hardware/software...just whatever is free).

These days I download shows that I cant see in HD, watch them and then wait for the DVD release. With almost every show after 2005 coming to DVD a few months after it airs with no edits (with few exceptions like "How I met your mother" being released in full screen even though its filmed and aired in widescreen so the release is CROPPED....GRRRRRRRRR!) its not worth the trouble of recording and editing.

This applies to live action only, toons still get the shaft when it comes to releases.

But I agree, also what is with the Australians and deinterlacing/interlacing.....my god if I see one more Australian avi/xvid that stutters or blends together I am going to scream. Cant anybody in that dang country record something off Boomerang and NOT botch the encode!
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