video games (was Re: UFCS for D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1266.1333244549.4860.digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com...
> On Saturday, March 31, 2012 05:37:49 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
>> > Dudes, get an HD TV. It really is transformative. And yes, it kills me
>> > that my expensive old large screen standard def TV is just a POS in
>> > comparison, even though it is in perfect working order.
>> >
>> > I can't even stand to watch standard def anymore.
>>
>> YMMV, but it *honestly* just
>> doesn't do much for me. Certainly not enough to blow hundreds of dollars 
>> on
>> it.
> [snip]
>
> Personally, I can stand SD less and less, and poorer video quality annoys 
> me
> more and more. But I deal with video-related software for a living, and 
> I've
> transcoded enough video (especially HD video) in my free time that I 
> _really_
> notice the flaws. There are DVDs that I watched 5 years ago and thought 
> were
> fine that I see now and have a very hard time standing them, because they 
> look
> so bad. There are even encoding issues that I see in blu-rays quite often 
> that
> drive me nuts (especially banding), but that's the best that you can get 
> at
> this point.
>
> My parents, on the other hand, don't have any HD anything, don't see the
> point, and don't seem to care much about video quality at all. So, it 
> really
> depends on what you're used to and what you expect. I've just dealt with 
> video
> encoding and the like in enough detail long enough to get really picky 
> about
> it (my Mother thinks that I'm a snob about video and audio quality). I 
> don't
> have a TV right now (I just watch everything on my computer - 24" 1920 x 
> 1200
> display), but if I did, I sure wouldn't put up with an SD TV. I'd be 
> looking
> to get a high quality, HD TV.
>
> But there's no question that YMMV.
>

I can actually relate somewhat: Compression artifacts, messed up aspect 
ratios and double-letterboxing (ie, on both top/bottom *and* sides) all 
drive me absolutely nuts. And it bugs me even more that most people don't 
even seem to notice.

Seriously, how f*ing hard is it to get aspect ratios right? You flag the 
damn video with its aspect ratio[1], pass it through *everything*, and if 
the *display device* is physically different, it letterboxes as 
appropriate[2], and *optionally* crops instead if you really want it to. For 
non-digital TVs, you tell the 
tuner-box/cable-box/DVD-player/Game-console/etc., what aspect ratio the TV 
is and it does the scaling/letterboxing instead. Done! Follow that and 
*nothing* should ever be stretched, squished or double-letterboxed for 
*anyone*. But no, everything's gotta be done as ad-hoc, 
fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants bullshit. It's HTML4 all over again.

Pulldown/interlacing artifacts and lack-of-vsync tearing annoy me too.

Light text on a light background (esp. when it's really tiny text, as they 
like to do now for some reason - do filmmakers and gamedevs somehow think 
high resolution automagically makes the screen's physical size larger? 
Because it doesn't.)

Pan & scan conversions of 16:9 -> 4:3. (Not that anyobne does that 
anymore...do they?)

Shaky-cam and rapid-fire edits irritate the *hell* out of me too, but I 
guess those aren't so much technical issues as production ones.

And then there's watching shows on my grandma's ~17", ~30-year-old 
twin-lead-input TV. Not *that's* a bad picture!

[1] And when the content changes ratio, change the damn flag, don't bake in 
the letterboxing.

[2] "Letterbox": Ie, *uniformly* scale the video so that one dimention is an 
exact match and the other dimention is smaller than the screen and centered. 
Cropping is the same, just choose the other dimension as the exact match.