How do I find the quality of a video I have on my PC?

Dont know about mac, but on windows you just right click on the file, click on properties, and then click on the detail tab. All the information about the video will be listed there.

The whole p thing is how many pixels the height of the video is. So for a video in 4:3 aspect ratio with a size of 640×480 it would be 480p

@uberbatman So it would be the frame height, not the frame width?

The height is 368 and the width is 672, they are all bit wierd like that.

Damn, just saw that you said it was the height. I’ll just round it to the closes fitting one.

In general, the file size, combined with the video-codec should be a good indication.

Sure, resolution (pixel counts and aspect ratios) are important. The quality will however also be very much impacted by the quality of the rendering.

A rule of thumb? My “good” quality files are in mpeg 4 (M4V, H.264) and size up to around 1GB per hour, including stereo and surround sound.

If you use a decent player, it can report the video’s resolution and other information. VLC is a good free player that provides verbose data.

That 720p and 1080p stuff is marketing shorthand for the collection of frame sizes used in “HD” television. Check out this Wikipedia page for more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television

There’s a table about halfway down the page that shows the array of actual resolutions used.

The “quality” of a video is a fairly complex function. It has to do with the total resolution (horizontal x vertical) and the bit depth along with encoding algorithm and compression if any. I like lossless open formats for media storage (I have a big hard disk and a small collection) so I use .flac for audio and would probably use Dirac for compressing raw video (it hasn’t come up yet and I don’t typically transcode the little video I have.)

@uberbatman i’m sorry you are wong!! ‘p’ isnt the amount of pixels as you stated, but stands for ‘progressive’. This is the format each single image is displayed per frame, as opposed to ‘interlaced’ (i)
I’m not going to explain what this is in detail here as it is irelevant to the question.

Walshy

@Walshy it is progressive lines yes, but something with 1080p has 1080 pixels in height, something with 480p has 480 pixels in height and so on. So really im not….

Unless of course you can think of an instance where something would be 1080p and have a different resolution in height.

Well I decided to just use the width and height. I made this chart to have an inventory of movies on my PC.

@uberbatman Firstly, I meant ‘wrong’ not wong ;)

The resolution you mentioned would be referred to as 1080 horizontal scan lines, not as pixels as you stated, even though the FULL HD image would consist of 1900×1080 pixels.

BUT that isn’t what you implied in your first reply is it? It came across as you were stating the ‘p’ was for pixels, and it isnt.

“The whole p thing is how many pixels the height of the video is…..” – This is inaccurate as ‘p’ has nothing to do with how many pixels there are.

Walshy

@Walshy Again, I get what your saying, but can you think of a single case where these two things arent interchangeable as in the example you yourself just gave?

@uberbatman

As noted above, the p is different from ‘pixels’ in that it stands for progressive, indicating the signal to be non-interlaced at the given line (pixel)height.

Both 1080i and 1080p, for instance, have 1080 horizontal lines. In interlaced modes these lines are painted in alternating sets of 540 lines. First set would be the odd lines (1,3,5, etc. through 1039) and second set would be the even lines from 2 through 1040.

So the p is not an indication of the amount of lines, but of the quality with which these lines are filled.

….. I get this…. but again, can you or anyone else give an example where the progressive lines would be different than the vertical resolution? Im not trying to be stubborn I just personally have never encountered such a file.