PureVideo/FFDShow settings

[Rogue9]

My setup:

Athlon XP +2800 @ 2.083 Ghz
512 MB PC2100
Gigabyte AGP GeForce 6600 256MB (Passive cooling)
DVI > HDMI to Hitachi 51” 16X9 HDTV
Output @ 1280X720
OS: WinXP MCE 2005 w/ SP2
Decoder: NVDVD Purevideo 1.02-150
FFDShow Version: ????
ForceWare Version: 77.62 I THINK (will check when I get home)


NVDVD settings: Anamorphic/Raw aspect, Hardware Acceleration On, Smart Deinterlace Control, Prefer VMR9, VMR pixel adaptive


DVD’s look great. I’m using ZoomPlayer Pro 4.5, VMR9 Renderless, Full Screen Exclusive. Much better than they did before, through my crappy old stand-alone player. I did a split screen comparison between the 2, and you can really see the difference. Its like night and day.

My question is this: Am I using all the correct settings for PureVideo? Like I said, DVD’s look great, and Sage PQ is pretty good, too. Although I did have to turn on “Bob and Weave” in Sage because the picture got a little jumpy at times. But the 6600 & NVDVD do a great job of upscaling and cleaning up the analog cable signal for recorded TV. I guess I’m just wondering if there’s any settings I can change to make sure that I’m getting the best picture possible.

I know you can't use hardware acceleration and FFDShow together, but I tried using FFDShow anyway (forget which version), and had horrible results. Very choppy playback, and my CPU was pegged out. I pretty much only had Levels reduced by 1 (to convert colorspace), Lancosz4 Resize to 2.5x (1792x1200) Luma sharpen .50, and Output YV12. I also tried Lanczos 2 and resized to 2X (1440X960), but had basically the same results.

Should those settings cripple my playback with this CPU setup? I'd rather use PureVideo instead of FFDShow, to decrease CPU usage. But if I have to use it to tweak the PQ, then I would like to get it as smooth as possible.


Also, I downloaded a couple of the WMV-HD clips to check them out. The 720p ones look amazing and playback flawlessly (even when streamed over the network). But the 1080p ones are like watching a slideshow. Very, very choppy. Any ideas about this?