Quality Problems?

[Ardour]

Okay, so I ripped a DVD (how's moving castle) and followed the manual ever so closely... But the quality of my avi file isn't all that great. I know it's not because of the dvd because I bought the disney release of the dvd, I didn't get it ripped off of some LQ dvd.
So maybe I'm being a bit picky or something... is it just me or is the quality a little worse for wear? Or is it because I didn't clean the file up enough?
There's a snapshot of my avi.

And here's a snapshot of something I did not do, but have... I look at this one, and I know it HQ. But the other one, not so sure.

Photobucket cut off part of the images...

[AaronAMV]

Put the player at the actual resolution of your sources?

[Ardour]

Well, yeah, I know that if I put the player at the actual resolution, it'll look HQ, but I was kinda hoping that if I ripped it off a DVD, the quality would be high enough to look good on full screen... Am I just asking too much? Or did I do something wrong in the process of ripping it?

[AaronAMV]

Well you're upscaling, so it will look worse.

[Scintilla]

Yeah, you can start not by not upscaling. If you want to view the video at full screen, leave it to the player.
You can also improve the looks somewhat by adding cpu=4 to the MPEG2Source call in your AVISynth script.

And you said this was an AVI file -- is it lossless? If not, then stop right there and go back to the original script before talking about video quality right off the DVD.

Other than that, I don't see any glaring problems. Much of the difference is probably just due to the difference in animation styles between Miyazaki and Shinkai (that IS Shinkai, right?).