MacMini - HDTV DivX / XviD looks poor..

[basquille]

Hi all,

First time poster so take it easy on me!

Found an offer that was too good to pass up - my local retail store were selling the older models of the Mac Mini's for half price - lower-spec model for €249 and higher-spec model for €299. So bought the higher-spec model with the intention of hooking it into my 37" TV via the TV's VGA port.

I now have it hooked up and it's running grand but I noticed a serious lack in quality when playing DivX / XviD on it via VLC / FrontRow. It's odd as the QuickTime movies trailers (etc) viewed through Apple.com via FrontRow look great but these HDTV rips just look blocky in dark areas and don't run as smoothly as i'd imagine.

Is there anything i'm missing? Have the DivX codec, XviD codec and AC3 codec installed and in the 'Library\Quicktime' folder.

Any suggestions? Was anyone else in the same boat as me and resolve the problem?

Many thanks in advance,

basquille

 

[killmoms]

This should be in an FAQ somewhere.

DivX/XviD are notoriously blocky in dark areas. You don't notice this as much on PCs because they have a crunched color-space in the low-luminance area. There's also the fact that Apple's trailers are encoded from lossless originals, whereas downloaded "HDTV rips" are transcoded from already lossy HD streams (broadcast in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 over cable/satellite), which contributes to a further drop in quality.

Nothing you can really do—garbage in, garbage out.