defferoo said:well... it could be that he wanted to keep the resolution as close to the original as possible while correcting aspect ratio. 853/854x480 increases the resolution quite a bit (which is why it looks bad) 640x360 drops it alot. but 700x394 = 275800 and 640x480 = 307200. I've actually done some calculations and the 16:9 resolution that matches 640x480 in quality is 736x414. so maybe we should all try that crazy resolution
Nope.
480p is 720x480 (640x480 visible/useful image), and is designed to be stretched by a factor of 4/3, horizontally.
This gives us 853.333.
The correct thing to do is this:
Crop it to 636.
Resize by 4/3 horizontally, to get 848.
848 is a whole number, unlike 853.333.
Now, we could also crop to 639 and then resize to get 852, another whole number.
However, lots of scaling algorithms like to use things that are multiples of 16.
848 and 480 are both multiples of 16.
If you do any sort of video compression, you'll love 848 (as opposed to 854, 853, and 852). Most modern codecs don't require multiples of 16 anymore, but they still like it - they tend to be much more efficient, and decoding is more reliable when you don't know exactly what the user end has.
Also - downsizing is dumb. You're throwing away your GOOD information.
The idea that there isn't enough info in the image to look good at a certain resolution is just wrong. It's not an issue of pixel counts. Regardless of what you do, you are LACKING 25% of the final horizontal resolution. We make up this information by stretching an image by 4/3.
Now, to throw away perfectly good vertical resolution is the most retarded thing I've ever heard of.
It only looks "better" because you can't see the jaggies as much. Yes - Brawl is a fairly jaggy game. (I have the in-game smoothing filter off, I may turn it on...) Move your face close to the screen and the small image looks WORSE.
Enjoy, all I did was crop and scale these as I indicated above:
They are the jpegs from the first post, and then they've been re-jpegged.