The Matrix Blu Ray - Horrible Quality in Dark Scenes

[hogfan]

I just purchased The Matrix Triple Feature Blu Ray set and am trying to encode the first Matrix movie with Handbrake using x264. I use the following x264 settings:

Constant Quality RF 22
x264 Preset: Very Slow
Tune: Film
Profile: High
Level: 4.1

Autocrop
Anamorphic: Strict

Decomb, Deblock, & Denoise are all set to "Off".

The output is very watchable, but the all black screen at the beginning of the movie where "The Matrix" title shows is super-blocky in the blacks. It is the same in the first scenes of the movie where Trinity escapes. All very dark scenes. I have compared this to my old DVD handbrake rip of this movie and the new rip is much better. However, it looks pretty crappy for a Blu Ray encode. Is the source material for this movie really this bad? I did a few sample encode clips and RF 22 & RF 21 don't look much different. I typically don't use any Denoising, Decomb, or Deblock settings for HD content. If the the source video really is this bad, has anybody encoded this movie from the Blu Ray source, and did you use any denoising, deblocking to clean it up? Pretty disappointing for a Blu Ray release of a movie that came out in 1999. Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

Forgot to mention that my playback device is Amazon FireTV (version 1). Other movies seem to playback fine with the above settings, so I don't think it's a decoding issue.

[rollin_eng]

Could you please post your logs, instructions can be found here:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31236

[hogfan]

Sure, I will grab this after work today and post it. Thanks!

[hogfan]

Here is the encode log as requested. Thanks!

http://pastebin.com/5EdNQDsV

[Deleted User 13735]

Video is vc1 - search that on these forums.

[hogfan]

I wanted to report back on this one. The issue ended being the Kodi Nightly build I was using (Krypton). There must have been a regression. After re-encoding with Ripbot, everything looked good.........but then a went back and played my original problem file that was handbrake encoded and the issue was gone. I think my issue was caused by two things:

1.) Possible regression in nightly Beta 4 build of Kodi Krypton
2.) Horrible, Horrible, calibration of black and white levels on my TV. I corrected this using one of the TV config tools and it looks WAY better. Turned off all of Vizio's "Processing" & "Picture Enhancement" crap too.

I've encoded several VC-1 streams since and have had no issues. No using the latest HB Beta build.

[mduell]

Playback environment errors or misconfiguration (software, hardware, settings) is the #1 cause of the "bad dark scene quality" complaints that drives people to silly x264 settings or quality levels.

[hogfan]

I was amazed at how badly this Vizio TV was configured! The black levels & white levels were WAY off.........and the led backlight was set way too bright as well.

[Smithcraft]

My Vizio's default setting was for the showroom, and not for home use. Perhaps that was the problem with yours?

However, I'm glad you got it sorted.

SC