New video card = VMR9 doesn't look so good

[davin]

I have been running a Sage setup that I've been very happy with... SD video playback quality has been excellent. Here is my old setup:

-MSI K8NGM2 mobo using onboard 6150 graphics
-Athlon64 3200
-1 GB ram
-Two PVR-150MCE cards for capture
-Sage 6.0.11 (running VMR9, accel on, FSE off)
-Purevideo version 196 (smart, pixel adaptive)
-An 8x.xx version of Forceware (I'm not at the machine right now, so I can't check the exact version I was running!)

This week I will be picking up a shiny new HDTV, so I upgraded my video card over the weekend to the XFX fanless 7600GT card. I also installed the latest Forceware (93.71) and the latest Purevideo (223). Here was my installation process:
- Uninstall Purevideo
- Uninstall Forceware
- Reboot
- Shut down
- Install 7600GT, Restart
- Install Forceware, Reboot
- Install Purevideo

Everything went smoothly, until I fired up sage. This is still on my SDTV using the s-video input. Playback isn't horrible, but I could tell that something was different. The best way I can explain it is that recordings of shows shot on video (Cops, America's Funniest Videos, various sports) have that "film" look to them. And crawls on ESPN2 and CNN are not smooth at all. The first thing that came to mind was interlacing.... I tried every possible setting in purevideo. Even forcing the deinterlacer to video didn't change things. I tried hardware accel off in Sage. I also tried FSE mode. Nothing worked.

Then I tried overlay. Voila! It looked like it did before... smooth playback. Video looks like video, film looks like film.

So, does anyone have any suggestions of things I could try to get VMR9 to work? I prefer the look of VMR9 and the nifty see-through graphics. At least I know that I will get good performance with overlay.

Thanks in advance...

[gplasky]

Make sure in the nVidia decoder settings have it set to Automatic and not Smart.


Gerry

[GollyJer]

See if this helps.

[GbrNole]

you didn't mention what video resolution you were using previously and what you are using now - and connection method then / now?

upscaling recorded SD content can get dodgy at times but your tickers should never be jerky. one thing you didn't mention though was using a driver cleaner.

if i was you i'd uninstall all purevideo (driver and codec) use driver cleaner and then install over again. i had poor scrolling tickers from driver left overs once before a nice clean install fixed it though.

[davin]

Thanks for the hints. I'm not upscaling anything yet... I don't have the new TV yet, so I'm still feeding my SDTV via s-video. I did try Automatic instead of Smart, but that didn't work. I will try a reinstall of the driver and encoder after running Driver Cleaner... thanks for that hint GbrNole.

[davin]

OK, I uninstalled the driver and decoders, rebooted into safe mode, ran driver cleaner and then reinstalled. No difference.

Overlay video looks great. VMR9 has the "film-like", jittery-crawl-on-ESPN look. It's almost like the decoder isn't deinterlacing correctly when sage is using VMR9. Any other suggestions?

[davin]

One more piece of data. I was playing around with GraphEdit and noticed that by default it was picking "Video Renderer" rather than "Video Mixing Renderer 9" when I dragged a mpg or ts into it. I adjusted the filter merits and rebooted so that it automatically uses the VMR9 as default. I checked in Sage... and still no dice. Overlay has smooth ESPN tickers, VMR9 has jerky ones.

Now... when I play the file in GraphEdit in VMR9 it looks GREAT. The tickers are smooth as butter... just like they look in Overlay when in Sage. I know that VMR9 is being used since the purevideo settings page shows the "pixel adaptive" and "vertical stretch" options in the deinterlacing box.

So it looks like Sage isn't using the same filter chain that is being used in Graphedit. Any ideas?

[davin]

OK, I finally fixed this. The one thing I hadn't tried was setting the renderer to "Default" in the Sage options. After I did this, the video looked fine and the nVidia decoder confirmed that it was running in VMR9.

So, chalk another one up to wonky decoder settings in Sage. This just supports the view that all decoder settings should be left at default in sage, and tools like DSFManager and GraphEdit should be used to adjust the system default settings outside of sage.