Settings for large screen display

[edgley]

Well I have just got my new Infocus SP5000, and now I have a 9 foot image; boy does it show the problems up!

I have read all the posts about Nvidia Processing, ffdshow, DIXA and am now completly confused.

I am running 2.1, connected via DVI and have a native resolution of 1280x720, but only using a Geforce 4mx and live in Pal land.


I am currently setup as follows:

Video options: Overlay,Nvidia Post Processing, A, Bob and Weave, Disabled

ffdshow: resize 1280x720

Nvidia settings: auto

The picture is far from fine. Sage has taken to changing the size now, I get jaggies on even faces, and fast action is depressing.

I know that I need a better card, it will be replaced by one of those fanless 6800, but I must be able to do better with the current setup.

Have I just made a mistake with the video options in Sage?

Thanks,

Simon.

[edgley]

Found my first opps.
Looks like I need a whole lot more settings set in ffdshow. thanks to avsforum:

Codecs all supported

Blur & noise reduction

denoise 3d
luma 0.50
chroma 0.50
time 5.00
HQ ticked

Resize & Aspect

resize 1280 x 720
no aspect ratio correction
Lanczos
parameter default, (any higher than this and i get stuttering)
luma sharpen & chroma sharpen 1.75 (might be too high for other setups)

[m0ng00se30]

Thanks for this info... I have finally joined the big screen camp... As most of us have found out 720p shows quality problems.

I wish we could get a thread going about settings or options for big screen displays.

--Mike

[edgley]

But we have!
I will be playing some more tonight, and post any findings.

What pj do you have?

[m0ng00se30]

I went the TV route... 50" Hitachi 50v500. I'm running component to it right now from 9800 Pro... going to swap to DVI tonight, and start messing around with ffdshow and some others. I'll post back as well!

--Mike

[edgley]

I have now run into ffdshow problems; not enough grunt.
The problem is that i wasnt planning on a CPU upgrade, I thought that a 2.8 with 1GB would be enough.

Darn it.

[m0ng00se30]

Ouch...

Can you narrow it down to what filter is causing it? The sharpen masks seem to be pretty heavy on the CPU, can you scale it back any to get it running?

--Mike

[edgley]

*cough* I think its with just resize.

Am checking now....

[DKT]

I have been using ffdshow for a couple of months with a 55" HDTV. It seems to help the most with DVD's and I have stopped using in for recorded TV, as I couldn't tell any significant improvement.

Have you check all of the AVS Forum as there is one site for typical settings that others are using and one member has a link to screenshots of settings and tricks.

Also there is an optimized version that "Andy" created for Pentium's. I think a 2.8 should be able to do quite a bit from what I've read. I'm using a June version as it works much better with my AMD Athelon. If you go through the 160 page post on this in the last 20 or so, there are links to the optimized version.

[kny3twalker]

I think part of the problem is the massive SageTV UI running
using other applications would probably make this much easier on the CPU

I think just letting FFDshow enter my graph for SageTV
basically nothing checked
my CPU usage was over 50%
specs below

[DKT]

I'm able to resize DVD's to 1440 x 960 with Lanczos 4, lumina 1.0, chrom 0, and my Athlon 3000 is 80%. Using the June version saved me 15% of my CPU. I think the optimized version for the pentiums is even more efficient.

You need to have a filter ahead of resize and this converts the color space (whatever that is) to YV12 before resize. I use sharpen - unsharpen mask - 10 (others just sent it to 1 to cause the conversion. others use levels (254 instead of 255) ahead of resize). This greatly reduced my CPU usage.

Also, set output to YV12 only, but don't check the box.

[edgley]

I will check, I thought I was using the latest Alpha, but sometimes I just cannt keep up with all the patching, driver updating and firmware flashing

I have noticed an improvement with a simple fix, increase the recording quality!
An hour show now takes up just under 3GB when prevously it used to take just under 2GB

[edgley]

OKay, I need help understanding this. I have just watched a 90 minute TV capture, with a file size of just 712MB, and it looks better, on average, than a Sage recording.

It was done using Xvid, is that is of importance?

[m0ng00se30]

I would bet its a progressive source... non-interlaced.

All of my Xvid movies look decent. Wanna see something cool check out the HD Divx trailers at www.divx.com, or the HD Windows Media Files at the media player site (I think!)

They will make that big screen shine!!!

--Mike

[m0ng00se30]

Speaking of Divx (Xvid) I see some settings for the divx encoders in the proerties file

DivX Certified Home Theater Highest Quality=videobitrate 4000000 width=720|height=480|audiobitrate=224


If it can keep up with that BIT rate... it might produce a lot better picture???? Are these progressive or interlaced files it produces??

--Mike

[edgley]

Thats only 3.9MB a second. More than possible, but HUGE file sizes.
Unless I have got my bits and bytes crossed again!

[stanger89]

The properties file settings are bps (bits per second).

[Ja'Man]

I watch all my recordings on an Infocus LP540 (1024x768 native) and am glad to see a thread like this going! I will try a bunch of different settings this weekend and post my results. Btw stanger89, are you still not using ffdshow? I think i saw a recent post of your various settings but cant find it now.

[stanger89]

Nope, just nVDVD 4 in DXVA mode.

[m0ng00se30]

I've had little to no luck with ffdshow yet... I'm gonna have to try different version... Just using ffdshow causes major stuttering (without even any filters).

I'm gonna try and goof off tonight with it...

edgley what version/build of ffdshow are you using at this point?

--Mike