I ask if at all possible to include screenshots of movies you rip, really helps everyone who's downloading know what quality to expect, that the release is verified and there won't be any nasty surprises along the way. You can see how to take screenshots above, and are free to upload screendumps here:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahscreens
or
http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahscreens2
Define Quality retail DVD?
By this, I refer to a properally mastered DVD, meaning DVDs that are for sale in shops from any region, but have been 'professional' transfered to DVD. This does not always mean it has to be brilliant quality, most low budget films have hideous transfers, but it must be from a proper source, meaning tvtransfers, pirate DVDs and DVD screeners should not be posted in this section.
So what's Quality?
By this wordage, I'm trying to seperate the 'best possible copies' from releases that may not be the best the film is currently available in. For example, many regions get better mastered DVDs (ie. widescreen prints, etc.), some maybe sub-par or VHS quality and if that's the case, and the quality doesn't seem decent or perhaps as extreme as near unwatchable
Secondly, this also refers to quality of rips. The following are some common mistakes that mean that your rip may be moved to the lesser quality section.
Bad/Lack of proper De-interlacing.
What is Interlacing?
A video display technique in which the electron beam refreshes (updates) all odd-numbered scan lines in one sweep of the screen and all even-numbered scan lines in the next. Interlacing takes advantage of both the screen phosphor's ability to maintain an image for a short time before fading and the human eye's tendency to average subtle differences in light intensity. By refreshing alternate lines, interlacing halves the number of lines to update in one screen sweep.
Basically its a trick that doesn't show up on tvs to display an image by quickly flashing images on the screen. However, with more sophisticated viewing devices on PCs, this means interlaced sources are terrible to watch (see the following examples), or more accurately unwatchable. You *must* always apply a deinterlacing filter when ripping to avoid this symptom in interlaced sources. Other wise the following examples are what is shown when watching:
<img src="http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahfiles2/uploads/deint1.jpg" width=512>
<img src="http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahfiles2/uploads/deint2.jpg" width=512>
How do I de-interlace?
My recommendation is to apply decomb or another deinterlacing filter, use
gknot to rip movies and follow the guide.
Bad Cropping
How to avoid
You should always remove the black boarders that surround the video when ripping a movie. To do so they must be cropped off right up to the picture. You must also keep within the resolution constrains of the codec you are using (multiples of 32/16 for xvid or divx).
<img src="http://members.lycos.co.uk/hhahfiles2/uploads/badcrop.jpg" width=512>
Once again my recommendation is to use
gknot to rip movies and follow the guide. You simply press
the crop button (under crop), then select smart auto crop all. This also ensures you don't get a bad AR (aspect ratio, squashed heads or fat heads). Group releases are considered 'bad' if they have a AR error of greater than +/- 3%.
For these reasons, a release
may be moved from this section, in addition to a partcularly poor video or audio source on the DVD. If its the latter this is unavoidable by the ripper, but unfortunately the distributor hasn't done the film justified dvd release.
