[zalas]

Originally Posted by houkoholic

You've pointed out why the BS-i broadcast looks better than DVD, and by the same argument, BD AIR should at the very least look just as good as the BS-i broadcast assuming that 1) they use the same source (which is very likely) and upconverted it correctly 2) BD has a higher bitrate and more bandwidth to work with. But the result is contrary according to reports, with BD AIR sitting somewhere inbetween the BS-i and DVD.

*sigh* I guess this is one more argument supporting the "Lots of Japanese media companies can't encode, especially Pony Canyon (who will be producing the new Kanon DVDs as well -_-)."

I guess I should elaborate on the complaints towards BD AIR. While the aliasing artifacts is and can be attributed to upscaling, there are also instances where pixelisation is occuring in various high motion scenes. The most obvious of this is when during the opening scene where Mizusu is spinning around, the the DVD version pixelation was very obviously occuring for the whole of Mizusu's character while the BS-i version don't have this issue, so this shouldn't be a converting issue but rather a bitrate issue. When I was looking at BD AIR I specifically paid attention to this scene and the stream they were showing had pixelisation in it (though yes, not as bad as the DVD), while it may be just due to that stream being poorly encoded, it's not exactly encouraging when you supposedly have 40M/bits to throw at the process (actually they even showed the bitrate bar and it clocks at 40M/bits) and still have such simple compression artifacts.

Well, it's not really pixellation per se. But it is mosquito noise (ringing) and yes, it's resulting from bitrate starvation. I was indeed hoping the BD release would resolve this issue, but I'm guessing they screwed up the upconvert process and/or using the encoder *again* orz
My guess is that their upconvert created too much high frequency noise/errors, and thus totally killed the encoder. For example, those alias edges have *got* to be ugly to compress.

Also don't forget that there's also the *decoding* chain where image degration can occur. Not all signal processors are made equal.

This is why I prefer to do comparisons before any post processing, so I can look at the raw, decoded stream. The decoded output before post processing should be pretty standard across all decoders, as the bitstream format and decoding process is well defined. This removes all the unnecessary doubt regarding the post processing, and shows you exactly what information is actually there and what got blown away.