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Help Horrible blue aliasing/artifacts in black areas during video playback

I took these in a completely dark room at various brightness levels in mx player (full brightness, level 2-3, and then level 1). Level 1 is one step above NO brightness, so about as low as you can go and still see the darn video lol.

Anyway, here are the pictures:

Full brightness:
http://i.imgur.com/6AXpY.jpg

low brightness:
http://i.imgur.com/C9k8b.jpg

lowest brightness (1 step above):
http://i.imgur.com/TABAo.jpg

It's not just my eyes. :(

Has anyone tried the earlier fix using a 3rd party app to adjust the default screen contrast/brightness? I tried it with mine and it pretty much eliminated this issue.

http://androidforums.com/samsung-ga...-areas-during-video-playback.html#post3669378
 
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I don't see any issues with the test video on my GNex. It would be pretty pointless for me to try to re-encode a bad file, so I'm curious if anyone has used my handbrake preset file (attached) from the other video thread.

I have a few 1080p mp4 videos on my GNex at 4000-5000kbps, and even the darkest scenes look great.
 

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I don't see any issues with the test video on my GNex. It would be pretty pointless for me to try to re-encode a bad file, so I'm curious if anyone has used my handbrake preset file (attached) from the other video thread.

I have a few 1080p mp4 videos on my GNex at 4000-5000kbps, and even the darkest scenes look great.

I don't see how this is possible. People are saying this is NORMAL for an amoled screen when there are dark regions and any artifacts. I'll ask again:

People who do NOT see this in the test video I posted, please do so in a COMPLETELY DARK ROOM. If there is any ambient light, you almost certainly won't see it. And I really want to know every aspect of your environment. What video player are you using? What brightness level is the phone set to and/or what brightness level is the player set to if it has its own brightness controls. Please provide as many details about your phone setup as possible. Perhaps you are using a player that masks it or have your phone configured so you can't see the problem. I'm more than willing to try out different settings/etc to see if it goes away or is masked. But I have not been able to get rid of the artifacts. Bumping contrast up slightly helps with the blue blocks, but NOT with the ghosted semi-transparent bar graph effect. I am grabbing a video to see if I can show what I mean by this.
 
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I don't see any issues with the test video on my GNex. It would be pretty pointless for me to try to re-encode a bad file, so I'm curious if anyone has used my handbrake preset file (attached) from the other video thread.

I have a few 1080p mp4 videos on my GNex at 4000-5000kbps, and even the darkest scenes look great.

I agree. The high quality trailers here all look great.

Movie Download Index (0 - 9, A - H) | Movies - Digital Digest


I think the important take-away from nj02vette's post is that high quality screens will reveal the side-effects of bad encoding. Ironically, you may not see this on low quality screens -- but, you will otherwise suffer from watching a lower quality screen in other regards.
 
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I don't see how this is possible. People are saying this is NORMAL for an amoled screen when there are dark regions and any artifacts. I'll ask again:

People who do NOT see this in the test video I posted, please do so in a COMPLETELY DARK ROOM. If there is any ambient light, you almost certainly won't see it. And I really want to know every aspect of your environment. What video player are you using? What brightness level is the phone set to and/or what brightness level is the player set to if it has its own brightness controls. Please provide as many details about your phone setup as possible. Perhaps you are using a player that masks it or have your phone configured so you can't see the problem. I'm more than willing to try out different settings/etc to see if it goes away or is masked. But I have not been able to get rid of the artifacts. Bumping contrast up slightly helps with the blue blocks, but NOT with the ghosted semi-transparent bar graph effect. I am grabbing a video to see if I can show what I mean by this.

If this is indeed a codec/compression issue, then it probably can be minimized with less compression and higher bit rates. However, if encoding at HD films and TV shows at bit rates of 5000-6000 is the only way to minimize the artifacts, that seems very inconvenient for anyone that encodes a lot of their own media. Aside from the time it would take, the file size for a standard film with a length of an hour and a half would be around 4gigs. I encode all my films in 720p with bit rates between 1500-2500, resulting in files sizes of just 1-2gigs. And they all look fantastic on my rezound.
 
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If this is indeed a codec/compression issue, then it probably can be minimized with less compression and higher bit rates. However, if encoding at HD films and TV shows at bit rates of 5000-6000 is the only way to minimize the artifacts, that seems very inconvenient for anyone that encodes a lot of their own media. Aside from the time it would take, the file size for a standard film with a length of an hour and a half would be around 4gigs. I encode all my films in 720p with bit rates between 1500-2500, resulting in files sizes of just 1-2gigs. And they all look fantastic on my rezound.
I actually don't think my bitrate of 4000-5000kbps is necessary unless you plan to output to a larger screen regularly. I do think optimizing other settings can help greatly, like b-frames and motion estimation.

Bottom line, I don't see any video playback issues under my normal video-watching scenarios, which does not include watching things at maximum brightness in a dark room. 50% brightness on an airplane, sure. 70% in a well-lit room, no problem.

If I put my TV (52" Sony XBR9, which produces some of the deepest blacks ever on LCD) on max brightness in a dark room, the blacks would not look black at all.
 
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I actually don't think my bitrate of 4000-5000kbps is necessary unless you plan to output to a larger screen regularly. I do think optimizing other settings can help greatly, like b-frames and motion estimation.

Bottom line, I don't see any video playback issues under my normal video-watching scenarios, which is does not include watching things at maximum brightness in a dark room. 50% brightness on an airplane, sure. 70% in a well-lit room, no problem.

Even ZERO level brightness in a dark room is unwatchable. Viewing in a very dark room at any brightness is a problem.
 
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Even ZERO level brightness in a dark room is unwatchable. Viewing in a very dark room at any brightness is a problem.
I went to the darkest room (essentially pitch black) room in my house, and I did not see any blue using the stock player and the display set at auto-brightness. However, I did see the artifacts in the guy's hair at the very beginning and middle of the video. The same artifacts weren't visible in his shirt at the same points in the video. This leads me to believe that it's an encoding issue.

I also played a file I encoded from original HD source, and the blacks were perfectly fine using the same device settings in the same room. I encoded that file using the handbrake settings I attached in my previous post.
 
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I went to the darkest room (essentially pitch black) room in my house, and I did not see any blue using the stock player and the display set at auto-brightness. However, I did see the artifacts in the guy's hair at the very beginning and middle of the video. The same artifacts weren't visible in his shirt at the same points in the video. This leads me to believe that it's an encoding issue.

I also played a file I encoded from original HD source, and the blacks were perfectly fine using the same device settings in the same room. I encoded that file using the handbrake settings I attached in my previous post.

I can see artifacts out the wazoo with auto brightness. I also see it in his shirt, too. I don't understand how this is not visible to people, I really don't.
 
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On another note, all the videos I transferred over from my Droid X in 720p with no additional encoding do not exhibit an posterization (thanks BV for the correct term). And I have several in low light scenerios. This is the result of transcoding and becomes evident with the super contrast of AMOLED screens.

Well, I have perfect eyesight, so it has nothing to do with vision.
I posted earlier that even those with perfect vision can perceive things differently. So we should all refrain from going there.
 
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FWIW, the SA+ display on my Droid Charge is perfectly black in these areas regardless of brightness and ambient lighting. The encoding is fine, and it's not an LCD vs OLED issue. It may not even be the codec. I think it has to do with the pentile arrangement and how the intermediate firmware handles interpolation of the true resolution to the physical resolution. It's probably something that could be adjusted in firmware. There's just no reason for an all black area like that to display blue blocks. The pixels should be off. Who would be responsible for investigating this issue? Samsung or Google? Probably needs to be reported.
 
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I just watched 30 minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in HD on my phone and the large black areas were horrible with weird blueness to them. The smaller black areas appeared fine. I still think the issue is with software related. It still looks like a compression or codec issue to me.

I think whoever said it was just the normal compression effects/artifacts being amplified/exposed by the samoled+pentile screen hit the nail on the head. It's not going to get fixed on the nexus (or any s/amoled screen for that matter), at least with this generation of oled screens. So I, and anyone else hating the dark conditions/dark video playback, needs to decide for theirself whether it's something that they need to switch to a new device over. The verdict is still out for me. Honestly, if I thought I could go get a rezound to TRY for ONE NIGHT to compare, I would at least go give the rezound a shot. But I'm not paying $70 to do a double swap. Even if the video is flawless on the rezound (which I bet it is, since people have said the LCD screen will mask the artifacts/compression effects), I don't know if I can live with sense until ICS comes out, and even then HTC will probably bastardize ICS to the point of it being unrecognizable. And who know if/when the rezound will get s-off. If I knew for sure it would within a few months, I would probably just bite the bullet and go with it and then wait on CM9. Since that seems to be no guarantee (what happened to HTC playing nice with the bootloader?!?), I think I have no choice but to keep the nexus as long as possible and then if the video issues are still bugging the sh** out of me, re-evaluate my options on 1/14 or just live with it.

On a side note related to battery and the radio, people seem to be think an update to improve signal will improve battery life. I say quite the opposite. I imagine one of the biggest tools in improving signal quality is to bump the signal power. More power == more battery drain. So I'm almost afraid they will alleviate the signal issues to some extent, only to sacrifice battery life. Time will tell.
 
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I randomly chose some movies/shows that looked as if they would have dark parts on netflix tonight in a dark room @ ~25-30% brightness, and I admit the artifacting that is huge in the sample video I posted wasn't nearly as prevalent. So I think the folks saying a lot of this has to do with video encoding quality are correct. Yes, I think the s/amoled screen makes it look "worse" (though some would argue having an area with NO definition/color separate is worse), but it's a classic case of "garbage in, garbage out". Hey, at least I have nearly a month to test drive this sucker and see if the video thing is truly an issue for everything I watch or if it was just a few things I noticed and coming from (a suspected SLCD) dinc, they were more obvious to me at first. I'm hopeful the signal issues will get straightened out, so as long as the video playback doesn't bug the sh** out of me 3 weeks from now, I think I will hold onto my nexus. Time will tell, though, as I watch more stuff. I will say that if it looks like utter crap when I watch the Dr. Who Christmas special, I may have to have my wife hold me back from returning it on 12/26 :p heheh

night folks.
 
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Honestly, you might have a defective device. The blacks are deep on mine, even with full brightness. Extremely little artifact in areas that aren't true black.

But in the heavy shadow areas, it's as black as the bezel.

I am so glad that i am on the same boat as you. No artifacts that i can see, and yes the blacks (no matter what brightness the phone is set to) are as black as the bezel and i frakking love it (sorry for the use of your word "frakking") :)
 
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I am so glad that i am on the same boat as you. No artifacts that i can see, and yes the blacks (no matter what brightness the phone is set to) are as black as the bezel and i frakking love it (sorry for the use of your word "frakking") :)

For the most part blacks are fine, but in my test clip, the guy's hair is definitely blue/block when you watch in a pitch black room. I don't see the blueness either in a room with ambient light. You have to be in a completely black room.
 
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The problem you're talking about absolutely has to do with the pentile display. I played it on my old droid 3, which is also pentile (but not super amoled) and it looked horrible. But I knew it would. All my videos, HD or otherwise, had problems with dark scenes on my d3. This is especially noticeable when the black isn't true black but a lighter shade of it that constantly changes due to slight changes in lighting (within the scene itself). It made certain movies just plain unwatchable on my d3.

I believe this has to do with the pentile screen and is not a codec issue. I had it on my Droid 3 which was also pentile. While it was not super amoled, it displayed the exact same issue the OP is talking about. There is nothing you can do about it. It's simply a limitation of the screen tech. It doesn't seem like it bothers most of the people here so its probably not nearly as bad as it was on my D3.

Not to be rude, but your Droid 3 is irrelevant here. It has an RGBW type of Pentile screen, which doesn't look anything like the Nexus' SAMOLED RGBG Pentile. They both can be said to look "worse" than standard RGB, but in very different ways.

rgb-stripe-vs-rgbg-vs-rgbw-pentile.png
 
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Not to be rude, but your Droid 3 is irrelevant here. It has an RGBW type of Pentile screen, which doesn't look anything like the Nexus' SAMOLED RGBG Pentile. They both can be said to look "worse" than standard RGB, but in very different ways.

rgb-stripe-vs-rgbg-vs-rgbw-pentile.png

No offense taken. Maybe I don't understand the whole pentile thing. But, then again, the most important thing is what I see. And I saw horrible artifacting on my D3 similar to what the OP was describing. Regardless, the key point I was trying to make is that there is none of this sort of distortion with the rezound's SLCD screen and that still applies.
 
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No offense taken. Maybe I don't understand the whole pentile thing. But, then again, the most important thing is what I see. And I saw horrible artifacting on my D3 similar to what the OP was describing. Regardless, the key point I was trying to make is that there is none of this sort of distortion with the rezound's SLCD screen and that still applies.
Good points kishin14. My only complaints of the Rez screen are that it's about as useless in direct sunlight as my old OG Droid, and the viewing angles are poor off center. Otherwise videos look great and text is magnificent!
 
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Good points kishin14. My only complaints of the Rez screen are that it's about as useless in direct sunlight as my old OG Droid, and the viewing angles are poor off center. Otherwise videos look great and text is magnificent!

I must definitely have had the SLCD screen on my dinc then. No artifacts to speak of and it was worthless in full sunlight even at max brightness. The nexus screen is decent at like 25-30% even in bright light. Just wish there was a compromise between the two technologies so I could have my cake and eat it, too. :)
 
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