I have been adding a ton of TV and Movies to my Plex over the last couple months and most of them have acceptable file size and good quality. For some reason, though, the show Extras looks horrible. Solid lines are pixelating and wobbly during playback (I know there’s a name for this artifact but it’s escaping me) and it’s to the point of being too distracting to watch.
My question is, should I be ripping these shows differently than American? I know they use a different frame rate but the DVD comes out listed as 29.97 just like any other DVD. I’ve tried everything and the only thing that stopped the issue was a huge MKV file.
Here is what my settings are listed at:
Video Codec - h264 (original MPEG-2)
Video Size - 720*480
Video BitRate - 4000kbps
Video FrameRate - 29.97 fps
I can only assume that this show was produced in PAL (i.e. at 625 lines).
For the american market it was later reduced to NTSC’s 525 lines while the frame rate was adapted from 25 to 29.97 fps.
Such a process will already produce major artifacts or at least blurryness.
Now you are ripping it from the already-converted NTSC DVD’s.
You are trying to remove the interlacing (which wasn’t created at 525 lines) .
I can imagine this wil result in major picture problems.
With today’s universally compatible playback devices, you are probably better off ripping the PAL version.
If you can get your hands on it, that is.
I have to say that looking at the images you posted, the MP4 is terrible.
First, don’t set a video output size that’s different from the original. Some of the artifacts in your image could be due to a bad scaler. Similar with the framerate (use the original).
As per interlaced content, you should try using Handbrake because it has a decomb filter for deinterlace which I’ve not seen elsewhere and appears to produce the best results.
