I am backing up my Movies on to an external drive and I am useing a PS3 to play them. I am putting the full copy on the hard drive with no compressioon. When I play it back it looks grainy. Kinda like an old picture i guess you would say. Now when I put them on to a disk they look fine. Have I done something wrong in the encodeing? Thanks for your help.
Ryan

Are you converting the DVDs to PS3 format using DVDFab? What kind of external drive is this? We need more info about your equipment and the settings you are using.

sorry about not having enough info. here is what I am doing:
I'm not using the ps3 format. I am Writing the VOB files to the External harddirve (WD 500 gb esintials usb 2.0) so I can keep the Dolby Digital or DTS audio. I did have the drive connected to the PS# directly but I am using TVersity to stream to the ps3 and they both looked the same. I also have a 1080P toshiba LCD that is hooked up to the ps3 via HDMI.

This is kind of a side question that I am researching on the PS3 forums at playstation.com : I cant run the menus like you would on a DVDs or get it to continue to the next VOB file automaticlly like you can on a DVD, when I do a full disk rip to the hard drive. Any sudjestions or a thread that might help. I have searched but my searching skills are lacking.
Thanks again,
Ryan

DVDFab will process the main movie of your DVD through the VOB Passthrough function and produce a single large VOB file of the entire movie. You can access this function in DVD to Mobile->Generic or if you use it a lot, you can use Customize UI->DVD to Mobile to add it to the navigation pane with all the other mobile devices (iPod,PVP,PDA, etc.) It will not have any navigation features other than those offered by your player software. You can read more about it in the Tutorial. The screen shots need to be updated for v5, but it still looks about the same. This gets you the original DVD at full resolution and all audio streams present in the original VOB files.

The grainy picture is actually in the DVD encoding. There are 2 reasons you wouldn't see it when the same movie is written to a new DVD. If the new DVD is the smaller DVD5 (e.g. standard DVDR, not a dual layer) then the video is being re-compressed. If you are using DVD Fab to create the DVD5 then it likely has a despeckle filter to makes the compressed image look better.

The other reason is that it seems the PS3 uses a different upscaling routine for DVDs than it does for direct video files. I've taken the same exact VOB content and watched it streamed, burned as a DVD, and burned as a file on a DVD-ROM. Streamed and burned as a file both had the speckles and jitters while the burned DVD played flawlessly. You can even copy the content to the PS3 hard drive with the same issues. Keep in mind that you are playing MPEG2 content that is basically 480p 24fps at 1080p 60fps.

As for your external hard drive, the method you can use depends on how the drive is formatted. If the drive is formatted NTFS then signals advice is correct (provided you own DVD Fab V5 with Mobile option). However, if your drive is formatted FAT32 then there is a 4GB file limit. If you can plug the external hard drive directly into the PS3 then it is FAT32 formatted. You can also right click on the drive letter in Windows and select properties to see the formatting. You can handle the 4GB limit in DVD Fab Mobile by selecting a 4GB split under vob passthrough. This will limit file changes to one per movie.

What you may not have noticed yet is the playback jitter or flicker for NTSC Film encoded VOB files (those from most DVDs). It is most noticeable on the top and bottom edges of the frame and on any straight horizontal lines in the frame (like opening credits). I have been able to eliminate this problem in many movies and wrote a guide about it:

http://www.synology.com/enu/forum/vi...hp?f=50&t=7965

However, my guide will sometimes make the audio out-of-sync and I've been unable to correct that so far.

As far as I can tell the flicker problem is caused by the 2:3 pulldown interlace frame information present in most DVDs. The actual film is usually shot at 24fps (rounded) and being film it is naturally progressive content (each frame is an entire picture). Standard tube TVs need an output that is 30fps (rounded) and interlaced. Extra frame information is added to the VOB stream so that older DVD players can output 30fps interlaced. Unfortunately, the extra frame information seems to be confusing the PS3 when outputting to 1080p causing the jumpy edges.

If anyone has a way to convert the progressive MPEG2 stream found on most DVDs to a pure NTSC Film spec and strip out the extra frame information I hope they will speak up.

Thanks For all the Info from everyone. I did read the tutorial and was just a little braindead until signals pointed out the obvious.

Complicated: I think I understand what you are saying about why the "grainy" look is there and there is not a way to fix the problem as of yet with dvdfab.

BTW, I do own DVDfab and love the program and tell everyone I can about it.

They way i convert the movies for the PS3 now is Generic xvid+source audio and the frame resolution of 848x364 with a fixed bit rate of 2500 to 4000 and stream them from the USB hard drive conected to the computer.
When I play it back and look at the original file on the PS3 it is REALLY small. looks good but WAY to small, so I use the Normal setting. That is when it looks a little "Grainy". It really isn't all that bad. Just doesn't look like it does on the actual DVD when played from the PS3.

Thanks again for all of your time,
Ryan

That is a very odd resolution for DVD source material. A DVD is usually going to be 740 wide. I get the best results for Xvid on the PS3 by disabling the crop feature and cranking the bitrate to maximum (5000). To turn off cropping in DVD Fab you have to right-click on the left side menu, choose customize, and uncheck the "Crop automatically" box under DVD to Mobile > Generic. The result doesn't have quite as good of video quality as the original but it ends up being about 1/3 the size.

If you really want to maintain the quality of the original DVD and play it on the PS3 then using VOB stream copy in DVD Fab is the best. Each movie would be between 4 to 8GB. However, depending on the source content and your setup, you may experience a bug where the PS3 treats file content differently than DVD content. I can play the same exact VOB file with my Popcorn Hour perfectly and get horrible frame judder (edges of things seem to wiggle) on the PS3. After weeks of investigation, trial, and error I found a way to fix the problem but it isn't for those afraid of the command prompt:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f116/high-q...9/#post2057122

As a side benefit, the process removes much of the graininess created in the original DVD.