Why is my system too weak for ffdshow?

[deria]

Hi,

When I recently upgraded my HTPC, one of my goals was to be able to "upconvert" DVD movies so that I would get better picture quality. My system is:

AMD x64 3800 x2 (dual-core)
1GB RAM
ATI All-In-Wonder 9800 PRO (AGP 8x)
* using component video output only (720p optimized to 1152x648 OR 1080i optimized to 1632x960)

* Windows XP SP2, latest catalyst drivers, latest NVIDIA PureVideo decoders

Now, I *thought* this system would be able to handle ffdshow quite well. At the very least, I expected to be able to upconvert to 1080i -- but when I try, my CPU maxes out and the results range from "very bad" to "incredibly bad".

Am I living in dream land, or just doing something wrong? *Should* my system be able to handle ffdshow well?

Basically, the ffdshow configuration I tried was this:

Setup #1:
OSD Enabled (to make sure ffdshow was being used)
Blur & NR (gradual denoise, 25)
Resize & Aspect (resize = multiply by 2, resize method = bicubic)

Setup #2:
OSD Enabled (to make sure ffdshow was being used)
Blur & NR (denoise3d; luma = 0.5, chroma = 0.5, time = 5, HQ = on)
Resize & Aspect (resize = multiply by 2, resize method = bicubic)

Setup #3:
OSD Enabled (to make sure ffdshow was being used)
Blur & NR (denoise3d; luma = 0.5, chroma = 0.5, time = 5, HQ = on)
Resize & Aspect (resize = multiply by 2, resize method = lanczos)

All 3 of these setups fail gloriously.

I'm using a recent version of ffdshow (from nov. 7, 2005).

Any thoughts?

[stanger89]

Disable the OSD.

[deria]

The OSD uses a significant amount of CPU? I had only been planning on using it for testing until things were working correctly. I'll disable it and see what happens, then.

[stanger89]

Yeah, for some reason it does. Also make sure you're in YV12 colorspace (set raw video to YV12 only).

[deria]

I saw that there is a newer ffdshow available (12-08-2005) which explicitly supports SSE so I installed that and performed some quick tests.

I only saw a slight reduction in CPU usage when turning off the OSD (but slight is better than nothing).

The newer version of ffdshow seems to help alot, though -- CPU usage is way down (in some configurations, its 50-60 percent and in others 60-70 percent).

Question: Do I want only blur, followed by resize/aspect, or do I also want to use "postprocessing"? The reaon that I ask is that a configuration like this one uses ~60 - 71 percent of the CPU:

actual display resolution: 1728 x 972
blur & nr: denoise3d, luma 0.5, chroma 0.5, time 5.0, HQ
resize & aspect: multiply by 2, resize always, keep original aspect ratio, lanczos (parameter = 2), luma sharpen 1.3, chroma sharpen 1.3

Toggling post-processing on raises that to ~79 to 92 percent. The guides I read didn't mention post processing, but if I recall it was turned on by default after the installation of ffdshow.

[GbrNole]

no post processing - i only use that with divx/xvid movies.

make sure not to check the "process entire image" box at the top of each menu page.