Why is Plex identifying SD video as 576p?

General Discussions
101

@leelynds said:
@zpaolo11x — my friend, with your last two posts, you have defined the various video resolutions almost exactly the way that I suggested a few pages back. In fact, you second post even disagreed with your first one, and you said a 720X404 should not be 576p or 480p but SD. Exactly what I said.

Why are we arguing, again?

We are discussing, not arguing :slight_smile:

My post is not “disagreeing” with the first one: in that post I said 720x404 can be labeled “SD” if we want to be super strict with a 576p definition (so ditching cropping and the concept of vertical lines definition as a 576p defining factor), but if we are using a list of resolutions and AR to define 576p, then I’d say 720x404 (at 2.54) can be considered 576p too in light of the concept of "preserving the vertical number of lines of a 576p frame.

And yes, you already listed the resolutions, but I’d point out that, without AR information, they are not complete. Also, I listed the resolutions as an easier, although less elegant, alternative to my method of multiplying vertical numbert of pixels by aspect ratio and see if the result is 1024 or 854 :slight_smile:

102

Holy ■■■■ guys… Cmon seriously? I get it you like your personal encodes but why is it even necessary? Anything from 1 to 700 lines should be labeld SD (equivalent to shit quality); everything above 700 horizontal lines should be labeled HDReady or 720p if the vertical lines are >1200. everything above 1000 horizontal lines should be labeled as 1080p or FullHD.

This probably isn’t perfect but I bet 99.5% of the users basically care about quality in the above mentioned 3-way segmentation. It either is low quality, 720p or 1080p.

If you are into DVD encoding yourself you can handle that. Everyone else just downloads stuff either in 720p or 1080p and those who still download dvd-rips are going to be extinct anyway pretty soon.

103

@mcboss86 said:
Holy **** guys… Cmon seriously? I get it you like your personal encodes but why is it even necessary? Anything from 1 to 700 lines should be labeld SD (equivalent to **** quality)

In your opinion.

I have 480p encodes that look better than some of that fermenting HD crap churned out by The Wombat Squad. Some DVD material will NEVER make it to HD in any flavor, or if it does it will be 480p ‘upscaled’ to HD and will look like **** on a Ritz - or in the simplest terms - you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse by sticking an HD label on it.

There is nothing wrong with a good 480p encode. A good 576p encode is even better, but unless it’s a PAL production it too is likely just ‘upscaled’ 480p.

DVDs may some day go out of fashion, but I feel it’s necessary to remind you that AVI files should have been outlawed a LONG time ago and guess what - they’re still around. No, DVDs will be around for a long, long time and as such Plex is simply going to have to deal with them - correctly.

104

Yes I know that a good DVD-Encode can be of better quality than a terrible 720p version. However to stay realistic most of the people don’t know that and will always think 720p> over whatever you call the DVD-Quality.

My suggestion is to just simplify those labels into a 3-way (5-way if you count 4K and 8K) segmentation. I’d say those labels don’t give you accurate information about the actual quality of the media file (as discussed in the thread it depends on so many factors like bitrate etc.).

If you know what you are doing you can pull up the xml info and make sure you got a decent dvd rip. For most of the people the info DVD Quality, SD or whatever you want to call it is sufficient to determine that they would prefer (if available) a “better” quality or higher resolution like 720p or 1080p.

And to “end” the discussion about the differentiation between 480p or 567p etc. You must be aware that for most people it’s the same, meaning either a dvd rip, encode or SDTV recording.

That’s my reasoning behind my provocative statement above.

105

You’re entitled to your opinion - and thanks for the thread bump - but this issue isn’t going away as long as I’m still drawing breath.

You’re wrong, of course, but so is Plex.

:slight_smile:

106

@JuiceWSA said:
DVDs may some day go out of fashion, but I feel it’s necessary to remind you that AVI files should have been outlawed a LONG time ago and guess what - they’re still around. No, DVDs will be around for a long, long time and as such Plex is simply going to have to deal with them - correctly.

Also, resolution is not everything in image quality. People laugh at a 3 GB DVD rip, they think a DVD rip should be at most 1.5GB and maybe in DivX, until they see it on screen compared to a 3 or 4 GB 720p rip done by the wombat squad, and they realize how color, gradients and motion are much better in a high bitrate DVD rip because thanks to the lower horizontal resolution and similar vertical resolution (talking PAL here) you can dedicate more bitrate to this aspects.

That said, I have a DVD player and I don’t have a BD player, on my TV screen I can’t probably tell the difference between a 576p and 720p from the sofa. So for me, DVD and 576p are not dead.

107

@zpaolo11x said:
Also, resolution is not everything in image quality. People laugh at a 3 GB DVD rip, they think a DVD rip should be at most 1.5GB and maybe in DivX, until they see it on screen compared to a 3 or 4 GB 720p rip done by the wombat squad, and they realize how color, gradients and motion are much better in a high bitrate DVD rip because thanks to the lower horizontal resolution and similar vertical resolution (talking PAL here) you can dedicate more bitrate to this aspects.

Man if that’s not the truth, I don’t know what is. (bump)

108

Whew!

Almost fell off the front page. Crisis averted.

While I’m at it, I picked up a PAL Documentary encoded by The Wombat Squad @ 852x488 and Plex reported it as 576p, if you can believe it. It should have been SD, of course because it’s not 480 or 576.

109

@JuiceWSA said:
While I’m at it, I picked up a PAL Documentary encoded by The Wombat Squad @ 852x488 and Plex reported it as 576p, if you can believe it. It should have been SD, of course because it’s not 480 or 576.

God only knows where the heck that 852 horizontal resolution comes from :open_mouth:

110

@JuiceWSA said:
I picked up a PAL Documentary encoded by The Wombat Squad @ 852x488 and Plex reported it as 576p, if you can believe it. It should have been SD, of course because it’s not 480 or 576.

Sorry, I’m not following the logic.

If I use your guide, I am supposed to set the display width for a DVD to 854 and keep the 480 original lines of resolution. as well as set the anamorphic flag. Those settings force the TV/player to display the video at 854X480 for an almost perfect 16X9 display. In effect, the TV is resizing the original 720 width to 854 pixels so that the display aspect is correct. It does the reverse for a 4X3 video, it resizes those original 720 pixels to 640, so we get the proper aspect of 640X480. In both cases, you keep the 480 lines of vertical resolution, and expect Plex to report that as the resolution

Now, I admit, this particular video is a weird size, and all bets are off at properly identifying the resolution. But I think it was intended to be a a 16X9 video, and if sized properly, probably should have been 854X480.

Let’s say that it was actually a video ripped from a 1920X1080 BluRay, just resized as close as possible to a lower resolution and bitrate for streaming, and you were aiming for the 1.5Mbps /480p settings available in Plex for remote quality.

Wouldn’t you use a size of 854X480 to achieve that? And, since the original source was not an anamorphic video, I can’t imagine why anyone would resize it to a 720X480 anamorphic DVD. We are not trying to make a DVD, we are trying to make a 480p video for streaming.

So, what I am saying, in either case, 854X480 without the anamorphic flag, or 720X480 with the anamorphic flag, they are 480p videos. I don’t think we should limit a 480p video to strictly 720X480 - that is a DVD standard. We are talking about streaming, and we don’t have to use the common defined standards.

Case in point – your guide for BluRay ripping, says to crop the video to 1920X800. You do expect that video to be reported as 1080p, don’t you? Not 720p cause it’s closer to that resolution, and certainly not SD because it doesn’t fit in any category…

111

Looking for a reason to encode at 852x488 (and I found no one), I came across some weird aspect ratios, like “Univisium” which is a 18:9 (aka 2:1) aspect ratio used, for example in Jurassic World.

Here I could find an “untouched” frame from the DVD:

IpYoeeu.png720×576

Some interesting things to notice: the picture is actually 720 pixels wide, no “8 pixels safe area” here. Looking and reading around it seems that DVDs can be 704x576 4:3 or 720x576 4:3 (someone says with the same PAR, which implies the black bars or excess image is cropped from the 720 frame, someone says there are two PARs) but only 720x576 resolution is supported in 16:9 DVDs.

Apart from this, notice how the frame has black horizontal bars, and the actual image height is only 512 pixels tall. This makes sense, again, because the DVD can only be anamorphic to 16:9, that is it will be displayed at 1024x576, but the actual frame image displayed will be 1024x512 (2:1 displayed aspect ratio for the movie).

The same movie in NTSC DVD format has a frame of 720x480:

OiGx3Z1.png720×480

but notice that the vertical image is 432 pixel tall. Which means that to preserve a bit of vertical resolution the movie is not displayed at 2:1 but at 1.97:1, a slight cropping on the sides to get some useful pixel lines. This is the main advantage of PAL DVDs with respect to NTSC DVDs: better vertical resolution and no need to pulldown, but the audio is detuned or stretched to adapt 24 fps to 25 fps.

112

@zpaolo11x said:
Looking for a reason to encode at 852x488 (and I found no one), I came across some weird aspect ratios, like “Univisium” which is a 18:9 (aka 2:1) aspect ratio used, for example in Jurassic World.

Yes, let’s all agree that this was at best, a poor decision for resizing. It really has nothing to do with the intent of the thread, to have Plex properly identify resolutions. This one just doesn’t fit logically by any method into a standard category as far as I’m concerned, and whatever Plex decides to use as a definition, we have to live with it.

And with all due respect (seriously) to both you and @JuiceWSA, we cannot apply DVD standards to streaming, which is what Plex is all about. DVD’s have a specific pixel size they need to be encoded at. By all means, use those sizes if you want when you rip the DVD to make a perfect pixel by pixel copy. But also recognize the fact, you have not made a DVD, you have made a video for streaming. A DVD cannot have h264 video, cannot have AAC audio, etc.

480p and 576p videos are not always ripped from DVD’s. They could be resized videos from a 1080p BluRay with a reduced bitrate for streaming. Plex has the optimizing feature to do just that, and many of us make our own optimized versions to avoid transcoding.

Some other completely irrelevant info regarding DVD encoding and acceptable sizes here at Wikipedia:

… a legitimate DVD video resolution can be 352 × 288 pixels and more… :wink:

113

@leelynds said:
And with all due respect (seriously) to both you and @JuiceWSA, we cannot apply DVD standards to streaming, which is what Plex is all about.

The problem is not that we are using DVD standards for streaming material: the problem is that Plex is applying a DVD/EDTV standard to the streaming material, and doing it the wrong way :smiley: Just call “SD” whatever is below 720p, and I’m fine, but don’t call “576p” or “480p” something that is objectively not.

DVD’s have a specific pixel size they need to be encoded at. By all means, use those sizes if you want when you rip the DVD to make a perfect pixel by pixel copy. But also recognize the fact, you have not made a DVD, you have made a video for streaming. A DVD cannot have h264 video, cannot have AAC audio, etc.

Perfectly agree, but 576p relates only to the resolution, not the codec or the FPS.

480p and 576p videos are not always ripped from DVD’s. They could be resized videos from a 1080p BluRay with a reduced bitrate for streaming. Plex has the optimizing feature to do just that, and many of us make our own optimized versions to avoid transcoding.

Agree on this too, and for 1080p ripped to “DVD size” there are the “non anamorphic” resolutions like 1024x576 or 854x480 that perfectly fit in a broader definition of 576p or 480p, IF you still want to call them that. If you don’t want to discriminate, then forget all this stuff and just call everything “SD”. That’s cool to me, just don’t call 576p what is in fact 480p. It’s that simple.

Some other completely irrelevant info regarding DVD encoding and acceptable sizes here at Wikipedia:
DVD-Video - Wikipedia
… a legitimate DVD video resolution can be 352 × 288 pixels and more… :wink:

Oh that’s a backward compatibility layer for MPEG VCD, and to be absolute nitpickers resolution is not “352x288 and more” it’s 352 x 288 or 352 x 240 (VCD), 352x576 or 352x480 (China Video Disc). Again, this is irrelevant as Plex is not saying “VCD” or “DVD PAL”, it’s saying “576p” and it’s saying that on something that is not 576p by any stretch of imagination.

114

The UI is plain lying. Factually incorrect reporting. Fake mediainfo news! :smiley:

It’s real simple: tell the truth about the video.

If Plex UI folks want to say only that it’s an “SD” source then it should just say SD or StdDef or Standard Def. or whatever.

But if it’s gonna report a file is 576 then it darn well ought to have 576 lines of resolution.

As it is, the app lies to us. Not cool.

115

@leelynds also consider that if we bring your reasoning we should label “1080p” only encodes where the resolution is exactly 1920x1080 (or 1440x1080), because that’s the one and only resolution supported by 1080p, while it’s generally considered acceptable to crop the black bars for 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 movies and still call this encode a “1080p” encode.

116

@zpaolo11x said:
@leelynds also consider that if we bring your reasoning we should label “1080p” only encodes where the resolution is exactly 1920x1080 (or 1440x1080), because that’s the one and only resolution supported by 1080p, while it’s generally considered acceptable to crop the black bars for 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 movies and still call this encode a “1080p” encode.

Not at all what I said, ever.

Please look at my charts, and you will see many possible resolutions whether copped or not, fitting nicely into a category. The resolution of 1440 X1080 is listed and classified as 1080p. I know I missed a few resolutions, such as your 2:1 video example, but the logic to determine the reported resolution still applies, and it would be categorized properly.

I give up. You win. Case closed.

117

@leelynds said:

@zpaolo11x said:
@leelynds also consider that if we bring your reasoning we should label “1080p” only encodes where the resolution is exactly 1920x1080 (or 1440x1080), because that’s the one and only resolution supported by 1080p, while it’s generally considered acceptable to crop the black bars for 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 movies and still call this encode a “1080p” encode.

Not at all what I said, ever.

You said we shouldn’t apply DVD standards to streaming. If we can’t then we can’t apply BluRay standards to streaming either, I know your list of resolution is fine and reasonable, but that list of resolution is just a way to apply DVD and BluRay namings to streaming too.

Of course we are not making DVDs or BDs but just encoding for streaming, but still, if something fits with the definition of a resolution that is used by DVDs or BDs (or EDTV and HDTV), I don’t see why we should not use it. But my impression is that while 1080p and 720p are “easy” to label, there’s people who don’t want to do the simple math and simple reasoning to correctly label 576p and 480p. I mean, come on, it’s not so difficult, there’s no need to find a scapegoat in the “dvd vs streaming” argument.

118

@zpaolo11x said:
You said we shouldn’t apply DVD standards to streaming. If we can’t then we can’t apply BluRay standards to streaming either, I know your list of resolution is fine and reasonable, but that list of resolution is just a way to apply DVD and BluRay namings to streaming too.

Final word, because I don’t want the thread closed.

I am not applying a DVD standard or a BluRay standard. I am using the intended display width and height, cropped or uncropped, anamorphic or non anamorphic, fitting into a 16X9 box defined by the various standard vertical resolutions of 480p, 576p and 1080p. The image may or may not fill the full display. The 16X9 box was chosen because it is the common TV size for all HDTV’s worldwide.

119

@leelynds said:
I am not applying a DVD standard or a BluRay standard. I am using the intended display width and height, cropped or uncropped, anamorphic or non anamorphic, fitting into a 16X9 box defined by the various standard vertical resolutions of 480p, 576p and 1080p. The image may or may not fill the full display. The 16X9 box was chosen because it is the common TV size for all HDTV’s worldwide.

Then we agree, and if we agree on this point, why did you say this:
_
And with all due respect (seriously) to both you and @JuiceWSA, we cannot apply DVD standards to streaming, which is what Plex is all about. DVD’s have a specific pixel size they need to be encoded at. By all means, use those sizes if you want when you rip the DVD to make a perfect pixel by pixel copy. But also recognize the fact, you have not made a DVD, you have made a video for streaming. A DVD cannot have h264 video, cannot have AAC audio, etc._

120

@zpaolo11x said:

@leelynds said:
I am not applying a DVD standard or a BluRay standard. I am using the intended display width and height, cropped or uncropped, anamorphic or non anamorphic, fitting into a 16X9 box defined by the various standard vertical resolutions of 480p, 576p and 1080p. The image may or may not fill the full display. The 16X9 box was chosen because it is the common TV size for all HDTV’s worldwide.

Then we agree, and if we agree on this point, why did you say this:
_
And with all due respect (seriously) to both you and @JuiceWSA, we cannot apply DVD standards to streaming, which is what Plex is all about. DVD’s have a specific pixel size they need to be encoded at. By all means, use those sizes if you want when you rip the DVD to make a perfect pixel by pixel copy. But also recognize the fact, you have not made a DVD, you have made a video for streaming. A DVD cannot have h264 video, cannot have AAC audio, etc._

Oh maybe you were referring to the specific case of that bad encoding, then ok, I agree! If the original source is a 1080p and you reduce resolution to save bandwidth all sort of resolutions can work (even QHD that is 1080p/2 :smiley: )