Arkady
One of the very useful purposes of these fora is to stimulate interesting discussion.
I can't help but notice that your original post has generated 4 pages of discussion and more than 1,000 viewers- a sure sign you hit a sweet spot!
When one notices something interesting, intriguing, or unusual, you can hardly go wrong by presenting it here.
It's not so important to be right or wrong- it's the challenge of examining an interesting topic that makes it fun and thought provoking for everyone :)

Arkady
I echo Robert's post. It has been a very interesting discussion and that is why I read the forum. Keeps my retired brain active !!!

I look forward to your next discussion.

Ron Evans

Hi

I was just reading this with interest.

I think what might be overlooked is the conversion to higher bit-rates seem to also swap to a different codec. What is being observed is probably differences with the types of de-interlacing taking place depending on what decoder is being loaded and used and how much CPU might be left over. Certainly I always find MPEG2 at Blu-Ray bit-rates compared to H264 at the same bit-rate, has the MPEG2 looking more watchable on the computer, even though H264 is more efficient and can do even more with the high bit-rate.

Maybe a better test would be to use progressive video to rule that out, but you also can't rule out a different decoder adding a bit of sharpening or other processing, or the placebo effect, which might also be a big part of this.

The acid test is to export frames with lots of detail from an editor (you can pick the exact same frames then) and flick between them as static images. Using Alt-Tab you can do this very easily on a PC, and I've taken snapshots from the original AVCHD footage, from footage exported as uncompressed video, and from the footage converted to high bitrate MPEG2 and H264, and they have looked exactly the same!

Regards

Phil