Whats the best mpeg2 software video decoder for mpeg2 1080i?

[mkanet]

I have some mpeg2 1080i material (premium cable TV recordings from R5000) that my hardware based cyberlink mpeg2 video decoder has a hard time with.... I am having to manually force bob deinterlacing for combing artifacts and video jerkyness to go away. I have no issues with ATSC 1080i... but something proprietary with Comcast's latest premium channels in HD 1080i. It looks like the problem stems from Nvidia's latest GPU hardware deinterlacing which isn't optimized for this type of material.

[stanger89]

I think you're largely SOL then. You're not going to find a software decoder with better deinterlacing than nVidia hardware. And I don't think you'll find a hardware accellerated decoder that works significantly differently, since their performance is determined by the hardware.

[mkanet]

The only way I can get this specific content to playback correctly is by overriding the default nvidia hardware deinterlacing algorithm DXVA2 wants to use via Cyberlink mpeg2 video to hardware BOB deinterlacing; which screws up deinterlacing for everything else such as ATSC (which use popular and expected interlaced video).

[kricker]

I've been using Gabest Universal Open Source MPEG Video Decoder v1.0.0.3 for years now. It's not hardware excellerated, but I get good playback with de-interlacing of all material I have used it with. I keep trying the Sage decoder as well as power DVD, Arc Soft and such, but I always for some reason come back to Gabest. The only time I seem to have issues with it is with animated shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy. I've had playback issues with animated shows with all codecs though. FYI, I am using overlay because DX9 tears unless using FSE, which causes other issues and I'm on XP so EVR doesn't quite work right in Sage yet.

[mkanet]

Odd... I just enabled sageTV's sageTV mpeg2 decoder and enabled dscaler deinterlacing support in sageTV... with a plugin setting to greedyH with double framerate. The problem went away immediately. I dont think Ive seen my HD premium channels look this clear and smooth video playback.

[kricker]

...and now I switch back to Sage decoder to try it out again

[mkanet]

I cant make up my mind between adaptive and greedyH. Im using adaptive right now. To my eyes and my display, it looks just as good as purevideoHD hardware deinterlacing (when it works correctly).

Edit: I ended up with GreedyH + framedoubling + odd field first. It seems to work for all content I can throw at it at the cost of some CPU cycles (which I have more than enough of to spare). I think some scenes have more detail than when I used hardware deinterlacing from PurevideoHD; even if dscaler deinterlacing is several years old.

[gsfitz]

I'm glad I found this thread. I've been fighting poor OTA viewing and could not understand the reason.

My video card is ATI 2600XT and most HD channels (QAM) look very good but most others (SD) from Comcast look terrible.

After playing with the Sage Mpeg decoder as you mentioned above the SD channels started looking as good as my Sharp LCD can display. Now it seems that recorded HD content does not look as good though.

My default MPEG decoder was PDVD8. I may end up switching back and forth when needed because the SD pictures are very good using Sage's MPEG decoder.

Keep up the good work!