Compare PVR-350 output quality with Radeon card

[tankd0g]

I ahve both a PVR 350 and an ATI Radeon 9200SE. The TV out on the ATI card seems to pale in comparison to the output on the 350. It's washed out and in scenes with a lot of motion there is a line in the middle of the frame where the lines are starting to desync and there a re lot more artifacts, especially in darker areas. Does anyone have tips on improving the output of this card?

[mlbdude]

For the washed out colors you need to do color calibration in Sage and/or in your video card drivers. Make sure any kind of flicker control is off as well.

For the other items you need to do some research on the different decoders, renderers, and settings you can apply to those. Unfortunately the 350 is just easier to get going well out the door.

[ckron]

Yeah, until you start having all those goofy 350 problems that never seem to get resolved.

[salsbst]

line in the middle of the frame where the lines are starting to desync

Sounds a bit like a description of tearing. If you have VMR9 running, try switching to overlay.

[kny3twalker]

going to be hard to get VMR9 to work when you got the

an ATI Radeon 9200SE

not a very powerful card

[tankd0g]

Originally posted by salsbst
Sounds a bit like a description of tearing. If you have VMR9 running, try switching to overlay.

That's what it was, thanks. The picture is still not as sharp as the PVR-350 output but I think I have it as good as it gets now. Lots of dot creep in the menu that doens't even exist with the 350 output.

[mlbdude]

Make sure you have all flicker control turned off in your drivers. You should not have ANY dot creep.

[tankd0g]

Originally posted by kny3twalker
going to be hard to get VMR9 to work when you got the

not a very powerful card

Tried my 9600 Pro in the same machine, picture was identical, so I guess both cards use pretty much the same hardware for mpeg playback.

[tankd0g]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Make sure you have all flicker control turned off in your drivers. You should not have ANY dot creep.

In my drivers, flicker control is a slider that turns down flicker at the expense of picture sharpness. I have it about 3/4 of total no visible flicker. There is also a setting for dot creep in the drivers. The choices are standard and freeze. On standard I get Dot creep on the edges of the font of the highlighted title in the menu but no noticibly on the others. If I pick "freeze", there is no creep but the edges of all the fonts are broken like they were printed with a dot matrix printer that is missing some pins and that really makes the smaller fonts of the OSD unreadable.

[mlbdude]

Flicker control actually removes sharpness. The less you use the better. I have mine turned all the way off for all my video cards.

Also, do you have 3D Acceleration enabled in Sage? With this enabled Sage is supposed to anit-alias the fonts. It might help you.

What resolution are you running at?

[tankd0g]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Flicker control actually removes sharpness. The less you use the better. I have mine turned all the way off for all my video cards.

Also, do you have 3D Acceleration enabled in Sage? With this enabled Sage is supposed to anit-alias the fonts. It might help you.

What resolution are you running at?

My desktop is at 800x600 75hz. I tried raising and lowering the refresh rate, that didn't seem to do anything on he TV. Does the resolution of the desktop matter? I noticed that the video playing on the TV is not always on the monitor so I thought it may be two seperate resolutions were being used. If I drop the flicker control below 3/4 the screen starts bouncing pretty bad, all the way off and you'd think the V-Hold was broken on my TV.

[mlbdude]

Well for outputting to a standard def TV you want to use as close to your source material as possible. Either 640x480 or 720x480 in the case of Sage recordings. If it is a standard def TV it should only accept around 60hz refresh rate.

That sucks about flicker. I would guess that is TV Dependant.

[tankd0g]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Well for outputting to a standard def TV you want to use as close to your source material as possible. Either 640x480 or 720x480 in the case of Sage recordings. If it is a standard def TV it should only accept around 60hz refresh rate.

That sucks about flicker. I would guess that is TV Dependant.

It's a 10 year old 25" TV so I guess I can't really expect that much of it I will of course keep tweaking it until the day it finally gives out

[turak]

My 9200SE gets the job done with no tearing. WinXP SP1, 9200SE, VMR9, NVDVD 2.55 decoders. I'm sure it's not as good as a hardware decoder like the pvr-350, but with alot of color tweaking it does ok.

[tankd0g]

Originally Posted by turak

My 9200SE gets the job done with no tearing. WinXP SP1, 9200SE, VMR9, NVDVD 2.55 decoders. I'm sure it's not as good as a hardware decoder like the pvr-350, but with alot of color tweaking it does ok.

Is that decoder available for download somewhere?

[turak]

Originally Posted by tankd0g

Is that decoder available for download somewhere?

I think nVidia quit selling it a while ago. newegg.com was selling an oem version on cd. I don't know if they still are. You could try the sonic decoders. On my systems they perform about the same as the nvdvd decoders. They can be purchased for $15 here.

[tankd0g]

Originally Posted by turak

I think nVidia quit selling it a while ago. newegg.com was selling an oem version on cd. I don't know if they still are. You could try the sonic decoders. On my systems they perform about the same as the nvdvd decoders. They can be purchased for $15 here.

Did you find it better than the Hauppage decoder?

[turak]

Originally Posted by tankd0g

Did you find it better than the Hauppage decoder?

Different people have different opinions, but on my setup both Sonic and NVDVD are much better then the Intervideo NonCSS decoder that comes with Hauppage cards.

Edit:
I should mention that some people (including myself) have had problems with hardware acceleration causing video distortion with WinXP SP2 and these decoders while using VMR9. I had to roll back to SP1 on my sagetv server because of this.