But I can see what you’re talking about. I’ll see what I can do to fix that up. The Codec does have a few settings which allow me to change such things.

Watched parts of the video and it is hard to tell if the anomalies are due to the video compression or the game itself, like graphics settings sort of low or off like Anti-Aliasing. I notice blocking issues at the beginning with blacks. Also, at 6:30, looks like Aliasing. Also, some parts, like in the aircraft look grainy, Quantisation Noise.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol4/sab/report.html

Look at part 6.

Also, another thing to consider is monitor resolution. My monitor is at a resolution of 1920×1200x32, 2,304,000 pixels compared to 921,600, 2.5 x more pixels. If the video is shot at a lower resolution than what my desktop is set at, the imperfections are more apparent than watching it at what the video was shot at.

I guess I have a good eye for this stuff. My wife thinks I am too critical but a trained eye can spot this stuff. I am especially critical of lossy compression schemes not only in video but audio. MP3’s I think are the worst and have destroyed music. Throw in dynamic range compression, jacking up the loudness, and converting to a lossy format and you have yourself a recipe for a pile of crap.

One of the best youtube movies I have seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H09xnhlCQU .The Hunt For Gollum. It actually looked alright on my 50″ Plasma TV. Pause the picture and look at peoples faces. You should see squares, full screen of course.

I found an option in the Codec settings called De-blocking Strength. I might play around with that a little bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5nWc3Nl2FY&fmt=22 (Look around 6:30 and beyond. That’s where it happens). Of course, the quality is almost like the AVI files FRAPS exported in the original file, so YouTube did kill it a bit as well. The blocking only happened twice as well, so everything else is set. Feel free to watch the video fully though to see if you notice anything funny caused by the compression.

“I have noticed that with my 10Mbps video if I get scenes where it’s very dark it’ll start to block up a lot. I’m not sure if that’s due to the way the codec is, VirtualDUB or the settings I have in it, but I’ll probably experiment with that the next time I export a video.”

It is due to compression. Satellite TV suffers from it too. It is just one of things that you get from over compression of the video. Think about it, the original HD video might require 1Gb/sec bandwidth uncompressed. Then you take something like mpeg 2, just for example what ATSC, that compresses the video down 20Mb/sec, 500:1 compression. That kind of compression, you lose a lot of information.

I use to use a program called DVD Shrink. It did really good if you check the deep analysis and adaptive correction options. Otherwise, if you didn’t, you could look at peoples faces on scenes, and see the video “morphing”. I still see it with low bit rate video. Also, your colors look washed out also. However, this is hard to ascertain because you don’t usually have a superior source to compare. There are other kind of anomalies that pop up that I didn’t mention.

Yea 10Mb/sec is a pretty good rate. I watch some 720p movies that are 4.37GB in size that are 5.5Mb/sec bit rate encoded in MKV and DTS 5.1 Audio. Some 720p video I have downloaded is double that. However straight off the air stuff, for a 42 minute show, I have seen files around 4GB or 14Mb/sec. I download x264, just h.264/mpeg4 avc, too and it is good also. You might get away with watching video at a lower bit rate if you watched it on a small monitor or tv. I usually send the video to my 50″ Plasma TV. You can see anomalies such as when there are deep blacks on the sceen, it gets really “blocky” or areas of the screen “morph” from over compression. I think the minimum for decent 720p quality is at least 5.5Mb/sec bit rate. Anything less and you start to see a lot of artifacts and anomalies from over compression. Most 1080p content I have seen has been compressed down to a DVD9 size. However, straight off a Bluray, 42GB content would be around 46Mb/sec bandwidth, 2 hour movie. Either way, it requires good bandwidth to take HQ HD streams, 10Mb/sec+.

The more you compress using a lossy compression scheme, the less you see or hear. Also, since that compression scheme is lossy, you have just lost parts of your video or music forever; hence, the reason why you can’t simply decompress it and get the original back. MP3 is a prime example of what I am talking about.

I think I read somewhere that when Netflix camoe out with the Xbox360 stremaing they added a ton of new people and their streaming side was being taxed.

I stream at least 2 movies a week through my xbox360. I also end up streaming at least 1 TV show a week.

I have heard of Netflix maxing out 10Mbps connections for an hour or two, so I’d assume that the quality there is pretty good.