What is DX9 Full screen exclusive mode?

[mkanet]

Stanger, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, you made me realize that this endless battle between some users swearing up and down that overlay looks better than VMR FSE or visa versa is just a matter of personal taste. Some people prefer their movies to look just like it does in the movie theater (softer picture effect). Some people seems to prefer exaggerated effects; even sometimes to the point where it causes other issues (but are tollerable to them) such as.. so much edge enhancement to the point of distorting some parts of the picture or a picture with more "punch" ...white level increase (to the point where they lose white detail on bright scenes).

I guess I prefer slightly "enhanced" sharpness and very, very little exagerated black levels (so I can see details that aren't necessarily meant to be noticed).

BTW: I think that there should be a ffdshow setting called "film-like projector effect" where it adds softness to the picture and random bits of lint and hair pop up

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW, black level and white leve are 100% calibration affected, so you can't attribute a difference in them to one or the other. Now the default settings OOTB for Overlay seem to be "optomized" for PC displays so the black level (by default) is dropped and the contrast (white level) is boosted (again by default).

Color is similar, but not as simple because they could be using different colorspace conversions. As for sharpness, I'll give you that one, as it seems overlay, in general, has some sharpenning applied, lots of people like it that way.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Stanger, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, you made me realize that this endless battle between some users swearing up and down that overlay looks better than VMR FSE or visa versa is just a matter of personal taste. Some people prefer their movies to look just like it does in the movie theater (softer picture effect). Some people seems to prefer exaggerated effects; even sometimes to the point where it causes other issues (but are tollerable to them) such as.. so much edge enhancement to the point of distorting some parts of the picture or a picture with more "punch" ...white level increase (to the point where they lose white detail on bright scenes).

That's getting into the trickier bits of it. When talking brightness and contrast, it should be possible (inless something is broken) to make VMR9 and Overlay have the same black level and white level, basically anything with a "user" control (color, sat, sharpness) should be able to be calibrated out (differences). That still leaves some room for differences, eg in color decoder, color accuracy, scaling, deinterlacing, etc. They use different processing paths remember. By all accounts VMR9 is more accurate than Overlay.

But yes, once you've been around this stuff for a while, you begin to realize that most "huge differences" are subtle.

I guess I prefer slightly "enhanced" sharpness and very, very little exagerated black levels (so I can see details that aren't necessarily meant to be noticed).

Again anything black level related can be calibrated out, And actually overlay is known to crush blacks and whites. Actually this is what it sounds like you're seeing, overlay is crushing blacks, that combined with a mis-calibrated display will make overlay appear to have better blacks.

Oh, as for sharpness, that's why many like ffdshow.

BTW: I think that there should be a ffdshow setting called "film-like projector effect" where it adds softness to the picture and random bits of lint and hair pop up

Haven't you seen the noise filter in ffdshow?

[nielm]

What I found confusing was that a display calibrated correctly for a windows desktop, and for photos in Sage (where white=255, black=0) will be mis-calibrated for video in VMR9 (where white=~235 and black=~20), which generally means that video will look washed out... And unless you can calibrate VMR9 separately to the windows desktop, if you get good-looking video, your photos will look pretty crap (over-contrasted)..

My personal feelings: VMR9 feels still a bit bleeding edge, and needs meaty hardware otherwise it can produce sub-optimal results (stuttering, tearing, etc). Overlay is 'old tech' and has been around for hundreds of years (ok, the hardware has been able to do it probably since Win95!), and should be able to run on older/lower powered hardware (like the EPIA M10000, 600Mhz PIII equivalent system that I used to have!)

[stanger89]

VMR9 is the most accurate way to display video, it displays it the same way a set top DVD player would (ie it retains the "BTB/WTW" info). Of course as has been hashed out on AVS a "few" times , PCs don't opperate that way, they don't leave headroom. So until PCs change to retaining head/toe-room (I doubt CE stuff will eliminate it any time soon) you will have to sacrifice something, either video or desktop performance.

[mkanet]

The only time I've seen VMR9 look better (no matter what) than Overlay (ignoring color differences) is when shrinking a video to a smaller size (ie preview window). VMR9 preview window will always look better than overlay. Which proves that VMR9 scales video more acccurately in that case.

I purposefully set my display resolution to 1920x1440p (on a 4:3 monitor) to display 1080i source material without any scaling or deinterlacing issues in overlay. On my display, overlay tends to pick up subtle details you wouldn't notice in VMR9 (ie mpeg2 compression artifacts or bad skin complexion in someone's face at 19.2mbps Video at 30fps). Its actually not too hard to see the differences when watching shows like David Letterman/Jay Leno in HD when there isn't a whole lot of movement.

BTW, when running at 1920x1440@72Hz VGA, my overclocked 6600GT on a 2.6GHz PC still can't draw the frames quick enough to fill the screen in VMR9 FSE (vertical synch=on/tripplebuffer=on/highest image quality) When I lower the resolution and/or refresh rate, VMR9 video performance is comparable to overlay. Ι doubt most people would even notice this performance issue since frames aren't skipped.

[something fishy]

Don't you only get nvidia's pixel adaptive deinterlacing if outputting to the VMR9?

[mkanet]

Pixel adaptive only works for non HD material. But yes, I do get pixel adaptive for regular mpeg2.

[Evil_Attorney]

Does FSE only work with VMR9 and not overlay? Will it work with all codecs (Cyberlink, NVIDIA, etc.)?

I just upgraded to 3.0.11, but can't seem to get FSE working correctly with my 6600 and 9.0c.

[blade]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

Does FSE only work with VMR9 and not overlay? Will it work with all codecs (Cyberlink, NVIDIA, etc.)?

I just upgraded to 3.0.11, but can't seem to get FSE working correctly with my 6600 and 9.0c.

It only works with VMR9 for me, I don't know if it's supposed to work with overlay or not.

Yes, it should work with most if not all decoders.

Set your video decoder in Sage for:
VMR9
Select your decoder by name (don't use default)
Default for everything else.

If it doesn't work, try rebooting. I still get error messages sometimes when switching between windowed and fullscreen so it's best to just have Sage launch fullscreen to eliminate a possible error.

The last thing to try if it's still not working is to change your audio decoder settings. Some audio decoder settings can break FSE.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

Does FSE only work with VMR9 and not overlay?

FSE is a way of running VMR9. Overlay uses entirely different hardware to draw the image.

Will it work with all codecs (Cyberlink, NVIDIA, etc.)?

It should.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by stanger89

FSE is a way of running VMR9. Overlay uses entirely different hardware to draw the image.

That's odd, because FSE "on" on my machine causes SageTV to sometimes hang when changing menu screens, starting a video or going to full screen. It does that whether I'm using overlay or VMR.

[stanger89]

Well, I suppose it could draw the UI in FSE D3D, but if it's actually using Overlay, the video isn't. It's possible that FSE+3D Accelleration forces VMR9 as the renderer though too.

[crasch]

I found that Overlay looks more like TV on a SDTV. I found for HDTV's look better with VMR9 .

[eehtpc]

Do you think this has anything to do with a problem I've been experiencing with a 1080i set? I have always used overlay because I found it more versatile since I don't have a truly dedicated htpc.