Calibrating your TV

One of the many, many things that gets under my skin is people not setting up their new TV properly once home and plugged in.

Why does this bother me?
By default, TVs are not set up to look their best in the home. Out of the box the settings are all cranked up way too high. This is to give them the “wow” factor when on the shop floor, trying to make one brand stand out from the next.

I can’t understand how people can be happy with radioactive-looking grass, bright orange skin tones, shadows that look like black holes and extra lines around every edge. Especially if they have spent a pretty penny on their new appliance.

It’s a shame that a more natural default setting is not common – you’re left to settle for the glowing grass, or set things up yourself.

For a proper calibration, you really need a series of test screens (found on some THX certified and Disney DVDs – Aliens and Cars are two examples) or calibration built into the TVs menu system.

So what can you do once at home if you don’t have any of the above?
Follow the steps below for a quick and dirty method to getting the best from your TV;

• Before changing anything, you should turn off any ‘advanced’ settings.
  This will be things like Pixel Plus, XD Engine, Motion Hyper Brilliance, Super Mega Wonder-Depth, or any other pointless nonsense that was probably a marketing selling point for your TV. These are largely a waste of time and can be switched back on after you have set things up, if you feel you really need them.
  
• Dynamic Contrast is common place with LCDs now. Turn this off too.

• Watching the TV in pitch black or with mid-summer sunshine beaming into the room will affect the picture greatly. It’s best to configure these settings with the curtains drawn but the lights on.
• If your input (DVR, DVD Player, etc.) has options to adjust its picture, set these to ‘normal’, or the middle value, or whatever the default option is. There’s no use adjusting your TV if the source’s colour is turned up full blast or the contrast turn all the way down.
• Turn the Contrast, Brightness, Colour, Tint, Sharpness and Colour Temp of your TV all to their middle values before starting (Don’t worry if you don’t have all those options).

Backlight
Turn this to the middle most setting for now. Too high will wash out some highlights and make blacks appear grey, too low and it’ll be hard to make out some details. There will likely be an “auto” setting for this which should be switched on once calibration is complete.

Contrast
Pop in a DVD or Blu-ray and find a scene with some highlights and shadows. Something with clouds on a sunny day above a field of trees should be suitable.
Pause the scene (a Digital TV box with a pause function will also do).
Set the Contrast to the middle.
Start to turn the contrast down.
Take a note of the value just before the detail in the shadows disappears.
Start to turn the contrast back up.
Take a note of the value just before the detail in the highlights disappears (such as the clouds).
Set the contrast to the value in between the two numbers you noted.

Brightness
This time find and pause on a dark scene.
Within this dark scene look for something dark on something else dark, such as a lapel on a black suit, or the outline of black trousers in a dark room.
This will likely be the darkest value on any source you’ll be watching.
Start to turn the brightness down.
Take a note of the value just before the detail you found disappears.
Set the brightness to that value.
Any higher can result in dark parts looking grey instead of black. Any lower and you won’t be seeing all the details in dark scenes.

Colour
Find a program with natural tones. A football match or news report will do.
Turn the colour all the way down. Yes, so the image is grayscale.
Turn the colour up slowly until the colours look natural.
Take a note of and keep that setting.
If you start with the colour cranked up too high and work backwards, your eyes will desensitise and leave you picking a setting too high.
Don’t be surprised if you hardly turn it up at all, this is normal.

Tint
This should be left in the middle setting unless you notice the colour of the TV looking “off”. As in greens looking purple, reds looking yellow etc.

Sharpness
I can’t see why this setting should even be on modern TVs with digital connections. I can understand it for old analogue connections where ghosting or bleeding would have been an issue. But on digital connections, each pixel should be displaying its own signal and nothing else. There should be no reason for ghosting or colour bleed nowadays. But, such is life.
All Digital Set Top boxes, DVD players and DVRs should have some sort of GUI.
Access this GUI and leave it on-screen.
Set the sharpness down to the lowest setting.
Slowly turn this up and take note of when vertical lines start appearing next to the letters and menus.
This should really be left at the lowest setting, but you may find yourself happier with an artificially sharper looking image at the expense of some ghosting.
Set this to your preferred value.

Colour Temp
Again, this should be left at the middle, or ‘neutral’ value, but the lighting in your room may leave the image looking too warm (to the red or orange side) or too cold (to the blue side).
Stay on the program with natural tones.
Adjust the value up and down until you find a value you feel conformable with. Unless your room is lit up with blue or red bulbs, you’ll likely find this can be left in the middle.

Save your settings!

Now, go back and do all that again, but WITHOUT setting everything to their middle values first this time.
This is because you may have knocked off a previous setting as you have adjusted a later one. For example, changing the colour to a more natural value may have changed the optimum value for the brightness and contrast.

Depending on your TV, you may need to do this for every source in use. i.e. if you have your DVR and DVD Player on separate inputs.

From here on you will likely find yourself tweaking the odd setting now and then as you watch various sources. This is normal. You are more likely to spot the odd detail missing or highlight washed out on a variety of images.

Try to avoid switching on all the extra super-special-advanced hyper settings if you can. These tend to add something to the experience that isn’t needed and can often make it worse. One example is was Philips’ “Pixel Plus”. This did some motion adaptation to try and make the image flow smoother and look more realistic, but instead took away from a movie’s cinematic feeling, instead making it feel like a live-filmed sit-com.
Not all are like this, some may actually improve something. I have yet to find one.

Please remember that not all sources are made the same. You will come across some dark films that look like the brightness is turned up to high. This will likely be due to how they have been authored and not your settings.
It’s easy to tell this on letter-boxed movies – the blacks bars at the top and bottom of the screen are pure black. Anything against these bars that should be black, but appear grey, will likely be because of how the film has been mastered.

Hopefully you’re now enjoying your TV a bit more than before.

Where are the complete Media Centre solutions?

After a lengthy, ongoing, personal mission to find the perfect Media Centre software (or hardware-based) solution, I have come to one conclusion – there is not such a thing out there!

Those of you reading this, familiar with the current offerings of Media Centre software and hardware, will likely be thinking that the popular ones are great.

Yes, I will admit, some of them show great potential and are very close to what I would consider “complete”. But not one of them fulfill all the (very simple) requirements.

These requirements are not difficult, or awkward, as each one is implemented somewhere in at least one of the solutions out there. And I say this from a completely non-developer view. I do not feel out of place taking this view, as the examples of what to do are out there.

Enough waffle, what am I talking about?

A Media Centre should tick a few boxes to be considered a proper, complete solution;

• Simple to use
• Little or no obvious bugs
• Customizable
• Has the ‘WAF’

It has to be simple to use
No one wants to spend more time ‘tweaking’ their set up than they do enjoying it.

It needs to perform it’s functions with out any frequent bugs
There should be no excuses now for releases to be riddled with a list of irritating show-stoppers, especially if they require work-arounds from the user for something which was once simple. Where I work, we have test documentation we follow relentlessly after every new patch or release of software. This ensures that things which have been fixed in the past remain working after we fix something else. All these new releases with major bugs that are found after just 5 minutes of standard use is not on – there is just no excuse.

It should be customizable
I’m not talking about in-depth, code level tweaking here. Just simple GUI options, allowing the user to switch on or off certain aspects they don’t agree with. Like whether or not to see the year a film was released next to the name, or which order to list TV Shows.

It has to have the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)
Nothing can ruin the feel of a Media Centre than the words of your partner complaining how difficult it is to navigate and asking why they can’t just put a disc in.

So where do the current offerings fall short?

Plex/XBMC
Technically Plex and XBMC are different apps. But Plex is based off the same code as XBMC, just refined to be Mac-only. The two are pretty much the same thing.

They offer wonderful eye candy and customization in the way of skins. Plex and XBMC do look absolutely stunning once they are set up.

But the developers are so busy increasing the level of wonderment to the eyes that the underlying functionality of the would-be perfect software is falling behind.

Adding Music and Photos to the Library is a breeze – the application reads the tags and adds the info to the library. (I’m pretty sure it could read more info from JPEG EXIF data, but there is enough there just now).

The level of plug-ins available is amazing too. If there is a web based service you use frequently, chances are there is a 10-foot interface version available for Plex/XBMC.

Video, however, is where they fail miserably. If you name your movie files or DVD rips correctly, the apps can ‘scrape’ the information from sites such as IMDB. But this does not always work as expected, far too often odd movies having the wrong info associated (it grabs information for D.A.R.Y.L. as “Droids”) or even nothing at all. And adding this info manually is a pain itself, with you having to add data to propriety xml-based ‘nfo’ files and separate image files renamed ‘*.tbn’ for the artwork/covers. Not something that can be migrated easily should you wish to change software.

Why do they refuse to add simple tag-reading to the movie part of the library?  One word – Piracy!

It’s so simple now to download files of the latest movies from torrent sites. They are usually in the archaic AVI container, encoded with the old, hacked, Xvid or Divx codec. This format is kept alive by bell ends such as the infamous “aXXo”.

Even DVD player manufacturers know the powerful pull of free movies in naff low-resolution quality. It’s hard to find a DVD player now without “MP4 video” support. They know full well that folk now have huge collections of avi files they want to plug in via Hard Drive or USB Stick. I mean, come on, how many legitimate companies out there actually offer services that would warrant support for these pirate-based format? Practically none! It’s not even “MP4 support” as they so freely term it – It’s support for Xvid and Divx in the AVI container.

The introduction of the open MKV container for HD video is thankfully eating away at the nasty AVI files, but even this is a complete mess due to lack of standards – you tend to find people encoding with it in a do-what-you-feel-like fashion.

Those like me, who like to encode their movie collection in proper standard formats, are stuck putting up with the above until the developers pull their fingers out.

We take pride in being able to add all the movie information you would ever need to the files themselves – Title, Directors, Cast, Release Date, lovely clean hi-res artwork, etc. etc. Information that stays with the file, like with mp3s and jpegs, no matter where you decide to use it.

Apple’s Front Row
This is simplicity in its finest. Well, almost.

Front Row is able to read all the information it needs from the files you import into it (via iTunes). There’s no need to worry about crap data from less-than-complete sites and horrible looking artwork. If you have taken the time to encode the file yourself and added all the relevant info, you are rewarded with a nice, clean collection.

But it falls short because of Apple’s apparent shunning of this software – the sorting of your library is messed up and can become tedious to try and ignore.

Movies have no options to browse by Date, Genre, Director, Actor, etc. All the info is there, and you can browse them in iTunes really easily, but in Front Row you’re presented with one gargantuan list. But this list is ordered via the “Sort Name” tag though which is a godsend (you’re able to order collections such as the Alien films in the proper order, instead of by name only).

The TV shows suffer a similar fate – multiple seasons are ordered one after the other, listed by Show Name only. For example, 3 Seasons of Dexter and 8 Seasons of Red Dwarf would be listed as follows…

Dexter
Dexter
Dexter
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf

…Where you find the episodes listed in reverse order (newest on top).

Another example of the poor sorting

You would expect the TV Shows to be listed as Show Name > Season Number > Episode ordered by oldest on top.

Windows 7 Media Centre
As much as I hate to say it (I’m a bit of a Mac fan-boy), Windows Media Centre is almost my favourite.

Windows 7 can read the data in the mp4 videos perfectly. Even allowing you to edit the tags (or ‘atoms’ as they’re officially known) from within Windows Explorer itself. More than Mac OS X allows.

But in some monumentally stupid move, the Media Centre side of things insists on pulling the data down from the web too! For the love of all that is Holy, WHY?! The data is there, you can read it fine! Aaargh!

It does integrate brilliantly with TV Tuners though.

The other Apps out there are very similar, so I won’t go in to every one. Plex, XBMC, Windows 7 Media Centre and Front row are the best I’ve seen.

What about purely Hardware based solutions?

There are quite a few offerings out there. The main two being The Popcorn Hour and The Western Digital TV Live.

They both offer almost the same functionality – play-anything codec support in a small form factor, with the Popcorn Hour giving the option of an optical drive.

But even these feel half-baked and rushed out. If you search online for bug lists of such devices, you will likely find forum posts dedicated to users listing the short-comings of these cheap and seemingly simple devices. I had to send back my original WD TV back due to irritations with playing back simple DVD rips (it would read the aspect ratio incorrectly, displaying the movies in the wrong shape).

Their interfaces are usually very sluggish too; with the low power processors unable to offer any smooth navigation to anything above simple text-based file lists.

No Media Centre is worth anything if no one can use it but you. You need to have something your partner, family and friends can pick up and navigate too. Otherwise you might as well hook your PC up to your TV screen and navigate the files with a keyboard and mouse.

So what needs to be done?

A few very very simple things need to happen to get the current state of offerings out of the depressing half-arsed Media Centre scenario:

Plex, XBMC, Moovida, Boxee, Media Portal and the rest of the ‘Open’ Software solutions need to stop dicking about with adding more eye candy and fix the Library functions.
No one cares if they’ve added the option to see the bit rate of the current playing song, or made the star rating from IMDB look better – if the bit rate of a song is bad, it’s not in my library. And I couldn’t give a monkey’s fart what rating the movies in my collection get on IMDB! Get a clue and import the tags from my standard, non propriety, MP4 files!

If they implement this, they will have a truly perfect Media Centre (the TV Tuner side of things can be handled via launching a different app from within).

Apple need to fix the current bugs in Front Row.
It was working before with the older versions. The interface of Front Row to me is perfect – a nice, snappy, clean, simple system. If they fix the simple sorting bug I believe a lot of people would drop Plex and XBMC (those that can do without the plug-ins). You can even get apps that will scrape the data for your *cough* downloaded collection and add it to iTunes.

I also feel Apple needs to stick to their guns more about abiding by the standards that they’re promoting. As far as I’m concerned (and I speak for the majority here), mp4 is the current standard to replace the ageing format of DVD. h.264 is already the way to go as far as the video codec is concerned. It’s scaleable, meaning it can be used for anything from small mobile phone sized videos right up to full 1080p video and beyond (it’s used for Blu-ray). And the multi channel AAC format for audio is perfect for replacing 6 channel 5.1 AC3 (Dolby Digital). Match that up with an embedded text file for chapter markers all wrapped up in the MP4 container and you have the perfect 21st century format for movies.

VOB container -> MP4
MPEG-2 video codec -> h.264
Multi channel AC3 -> AAC
Chapter markers -> nameable chapter text file

All of that results in a smaller format, practically indistinguishable from the original, and able to hold all the metadata you could need.

The problem is, there are no Amp manufacturers currently supporting decoding for a multi channel AAC bitstream, you have to feed them something they can understand. The most obvious is AC3.

Plex already does this by transcoding multi channel AAC into AC3 on the fly. This is perfect as you have a standard format to store your movies in. But, Apple seem reluctant to fork out for Dolby Live licences, leaving any multi channel AAC sound being down converted to a PLII Stereo signal at best.

All that is needed is for them to allow the Apple TV, Quicktime, Front Row and even the iPhone and iPods to accept multi channel AAC and either convert it to AC3 for current amps (as Plex does) or, with regards to the iPods, down convert it to a stereo source.

Because they are dragging their heels over this, we’re forced to create a file with two audio tracks – one as a PLII mix of the original AC3 track and the second as a pass-through of the AC3 track. This breaks the mp4 container standard and leaves you with a file, although more compatible with current devices, larger than it needs to be. It’s also has the extension “.m4v” making it feel more like another propriety format.

*sigh*

I feel so strongly about this as I honestly cannot find a single bit of kit worth writing a glowing report about and yet I believe it’s not something that should be this hard to find. I have used all of the well known apps, and read enough forums about the hardware based Media Centres to know that I’ll still be searching for a while yet.

You show me a Media Centre and I’ll show you where it falls short…

Guide for converting DVDs to MP4

I have been asked numerous times about how to encode purchased DVDs into the video equivalent of MP3. For me, and many others, this is MP4.

The below steps will explain how to convert a DVD into a MP4 format, complete with metadata and artwork. (The process is nearly identical on Windows and Mac – Sorry Linux fans, I have yet to dabble with this on that platform, but I’m sure it’s almost the same too)

Even though you own the DVD, the act of ripping it and converting to another format is still very much a legal grey area. (I hope this guide doesn’t get pulled because of this!)

You will need a few applications;
MacTheRipper (Mac) or DVDShrink (Windows)
Handbrake (Mac & Windows)
MetaX (Mac & Windows) or Subler (Mac)

And a few sites to help with obtaining the metadata;
IMDb (General Data)
Netflix (Genre and Outline)
Barnes & Noble (Chapters)
tagChimp (General Data and Chapters)
Wikipedia (General Data)
Get Video Artwork (High resolution artwork)
Blockbuster (UK Ratings)
Internet Movie Poster Database (Last resort if you cannot find decent artwork)

Ripping the DVD

Handbrake can convert straight form the physical disk itself, but I prefer to rip it to my Hard Drive first.

With MacTheRipper, it’s easier to insert the disk and click “Go!”. This will rip the entire contents of the DVD, allowing you to pick out the parts you need later. Ripping a specific Title can be a bit fiddly.

DVDShrink can do the same thing via the “Entire Disk” button. But it is much easier to rip just the Title of the Main Feature using the Re-Author option.

To save getting into unnecessary detail, for the purpose of this guide, rip the whole Disk.

Encoding the Movie

1. Launch Handbrake. You should be prompted for the Source File(s). If not, select File>Open.

2. Handbrake will scan the Contents. Once finished, open the Preset tray and select Universal.

3. In the main screen pick the Title you want to encode. This is usually the longest one for the main feature. Play the DVD elsewhere and take note of the Title number to be sure.

4. Type in the location and name of your desired output file (for the Windows version, all special characters must be removed. You can change the filename after).

The default setup here should be fine for most people, so it is safe to skip onto the Audio and Subtitles Step – you will be left with a perfectly acceptable video file. If you’re interested in some of the finer points, read on…

5. In the Video tab click Picture Settings.

5a. Set Anamorphic to Strict – this will force Handbrake to keep a pixel-for-pixel resolution of the original (no scaling like with the loose option)

Because of this, you have to adjust the Cropping to keep the video the correct shape;

5b. Set the crop to Custom and adjust the numbers so that they are multiples of 16 (this is to do with macroblocks – there are numerous post online explaining this, but for now trust me, 16 is the magic number) and even numbers (e.g. if you find you have 71 and 73 for the top and bottom, you should change them to 72 and 72 – this is to do with efficient encoding).

Keep note of how much of the video you are cutting away or adding back. adding too much back may leave more black edges than you would have liked. Cutting too much away may take away too much of the film. The last one is highly unlikely as, when overscan on CRT TVs was an issue, the extreme edges of the film were cut off anyway.

5c. If your source is interlaced or Telecined (again, plenty of posts about this elsewhere) select the relevant Filters. Decomb can be left on if you are unsure, as this is like a ‘safe’ de-interlacer that will only be brought into effect if needed.

5d. Now check your Source, Output and Anamorphic numbers;

The Output should be the source minus your crop values, exactly. The Anamorphic should with the same height as the Output. This can be ignored if you have chosen “Loose Anamorphic”. I prefer strict as you are left with an exact pixel-for-pixel copy of the original without any scaling.

6. Onto the Audio and Subtitles Tab.

6a. The default here is for track 1 to be an AAC Pro Logic II mix-down of the 5.1 AC3 source, with Tack 2 being a passthru of the source. This is fine in nearly every case.

The two tracks are for compatibility. The Apple TV and Media Players can pick off the AC3 5.1 track (Amplifier friendly) whereas the iPhone and iPods can use the Pro Logic II track, as it’s just stereo. The ProLogic II allows those with PLII amps to playback the pseudo-5.1 from the portable devices too.

Ideally you would do away with both of these and choose the 6-Channel discrete AAC, as this is the ideal equivalent to AC3 5.1. But due to a slow uptake on this standard we are forced to use the 2-Track method above, breaking the MP4 standards. Plex and XBMC can down-sample 6-Channel discrete AAC to AC3 5.1, but they are the only ones, leaving you with a file un-playable on the iPods and iPhone and a mix-down to something non-AC3 from the Apple TV. A real shame, but what can you do?

You can set the 2nd Track to None if the source is only Stereo or Dolby Surround (no point have two sets of 2-Channel tracks).

6b. Choose any subtitles you would like hard-encoded to the movie file. These will be ‘burnt’ onto the video itself so be sure before you choose any (such as Forces Subtitles where some Movies may have translated scenes). I will post another guide for adding soft-subs to your files once I have found a bullet-proof method.

7. The Chapters Tab.

7a. Fill in the chapters via whichever method suites you (copy and pasting from one of the sites listed above, manually from the DVD box, or choose your own by watching the movie).

The Advanced Tab can be left alone, as this is really reserved for the hard-core tinkeres.

8. Click Add To Queue or Start depending on how many DVDs you are encoding. Depending on your Computer, the encoding process can take anywhere from 1 hour to 1 day (yes my 8 year old PC used to take a whole day to do this!).

Adding the Metadata, or ‘tags’

If you’re only interested in a file to playback the Movie, indifferent to cataloguing your collection, you can skip adding any data to the file. I, however, like having all the information stored within the file, like with MP3s (it’s only Apple Media players and various Operating Systems that can read this data for now, but this will change).

Open your weapon of choice, be it MetaX, Subler or one of the more obscure ones and populate all the required fields. The sites listed above are great for this.

Once complete, Save/Write the data to the file.

You’re done!

The file you are left with is about 33% to 50% the size of the DVD Title and can be imported to iTunes with all the data intact. It will be exactly the same resolution as the original (if you choose the ‘strict’ method) and can be played back on almost any device – one file the rule them all!

I will post a guide for Blu-ray and High Def rips once that process has been more streamlined and standardised.

Some likely questions and things to note

Why choose the ‘Universal’ Preset?
This is the most compatible format to use. It leaves out all the unnecessary ‘extras’ that make it un-playable on some devices. One example is the B-frames added for the Apple TV preset – this only saves about 10% more file space but makes no improvements to video quality.
The consoles are always changing their requirements and therefore rendering their presets useless too often. They are being removed from the next release I believe.
The AVI container is a dying format and will also be removed from the next release of Handbrake.
The device-specific presets reduce the resolution for playback via the device’s screen only – too low for TV use really.

Be careful of blank chapters at the end of a Title.
Some DVDs are authored with a chapter at the end of the movie no more than about 3 seconds long. This is to help with the menu navigation (I think) and can be left out (select the previous Chapter as the last one in Handbrake’s main screen). leaving it in will result in an unwanted entry at the end of your Chapter List – not a huge deal, but irritating non the less.

Double-check your Movie duration once encoding is complete.
Handbrake will add or remove a few frames here and there to keep things in sync (nothing that can be spotted during playback, don’t worry) so the output file’s duration should be the same as the original, give or take a few seconds at the most. The movie studios are very aware that programs like Handbrake can circumvent most attempts to prevent encoding, so have started adding deliberate errors to the DVDs. These errors are handled by stand-alone players no problem, and skipped over, but many can cause Handbrake to choke. I am suffering from this issue with Iron Man – selecting the subtitle track for the bits of translation at various scenes causes Handbrake to drop whole scenes from the movie, leaving me with a file a full 15 minutes too short. This is because they haven’t kept that particular subtitle track’s time-stamp in sync with the main movie… sneaky cretins.

You can set the Constant Quality to anything from 59% to 62%.
Anything lower will result in noticeable artefacts. Any higher and you are wasting space. In this version of Handbrake, the percentage is in relation to the original film source, not the DVD – setting it to 80% will result in a file the same size as the original DVD, any higher and the size balloons. In comparison, a Blu-ray is considered 95% percent of the original film source.

The same method can be followed for TV Shows and 4:3 sources.
Just select the required Title, or Chapter range, that relates to the episode you’re wanting.

Some DVDs will flat-out refuse to rip.
For these you can plump out for DVDFab.

Please post any questions relating to this guide in the comments below.
I will respond as best I can.