TIP: How to get a good TV picture with Dscaler5 and deinterlacing

[-stattik-]

I've posted about this in the past because I've tweaked the picture the way I like it but I tried so many solutions that I was never sure exactly what variables were contributing to the picture.

I recently did a complete reinstall and was able to do a clean test to make sure I know what software settings were responsible for the picture. Here's my hardware setup:

GeForce4 420MX
Pentium 4 2.6
1 GIG RAM
56" sdtv

FFDshow post-processing disabled.


Install Dscaler and choose it as your default video decoder in the config app. Click on video decoder settings and go to deinterlace settings and choose the setting that works best for you. Force Weave worked best for me.

Some may ask why you would want to deinterlace a picture when you're displaying it on a interlaced screen... Well the short answer is that it looks better. The long answer, while not very technical, has to do with the fact that the original interlaced picture is shrunk/expanded to fit the gbpvr resolution (800x600 in my case) then it's re-shrunk/expanded to NTSC resoltion and probably re-interlaced which hoses the pre-interlaced even more.

[GoodGuys]

I used to use 720x576 resolution, and luckily for me I have a Toshiba 100Hz SDTV, which basically does an exquisite job deinterlacing everything... So deinterlacing isn't important for me, and I save the CPU cycles (and power, heat).
However, when I choose DScaler Mpeg2 decoder, and click 'Decoder Properties' - nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

GGF