PowerDVD - Animes are very blurry

[xtpe]

hi
Yesterday I bought the DVD from "School Rumble" and was really surprised of the quality. It is hard to describe so I made two screenshots here:

LINK

How come the Fansub which was were encoded of the DVD rips have this much better quality? I am pretty sure that it must be some bad configurations of my PowerDVD but what should I change?

At first I wasn't sure whether to post in the playback forum but since it is a software question I thought this forum was the right place. Hope I was right...

[bayoab]

Nothing is wrong with your power DVD. All you did was buy a copy of the fansub(bootleg) with the resolution increased. There is no legal copy of SR out outside of the R2s.

[xtpe]

It isn't a bootleg. I bought the legitimate release of Tokyopop who released it this month here in Germany.

[Nicholi]

Well if it is a legitimate DVD then, it is in 99% of all cases impossible for the fansub to have higher quality video then the DVD. It could simply be that the Cyberlink MPEG2 Decoder (the decoder that comes with PowerDVD) uses super high Postprocessing by default. Or some other options in PowerDVD itself that are doing that to the picture.

Hmm however, does that mean this DVD is R2 Japan or R2 Germany? Since Germany uses PAL there could be a likely chance the NTSC->PAL conversion was botched and extremely ugly (it usually is in almost every other DVD), so that could be the reason.

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by xtpe

It isn't a bootleg. I bought the legitimate release of Tokyopop who released it this month here in Germany.

I've heard reports that German DVD releases can be really, REALLY poorly made. Like, they take the masters and just destroy them when encoding them.

In fact, I've gotten some people from Germany contact me in reguards to Pretty Cure, asking for raw versions of my fansubs, because they were supposedly better video quality than the DVDs that were released over there.

It's true that fansubs can never be "better" than the sources they come from (some encoders might argue this point ), but one encode can definitly be better than another. So because german DVDs are probably reauthored, if the DVD encoder sucks, they could be worse quality than the fansubs.

[xtpe]

Oh, then I threw the 27€ away for nothing.

But thanks for the info.

[Eeknay]

General rule of thumb, don't buy PAL anime... it usually sucks.

[Nicholi]

Originally Posted by Eeknay

General rule of thumb, don't buy PAL anime... it usually sucks.

Indeed.

Even comparing many R2 Jap DVDs to their North American R1 counterparts the quality is just not there. It is sickening in many cases and only mildly bearable in others. Though I still doubt any fansub could have higher quality then even an R1 DVD, I speak of tv captured fansubs of course.