Colour spaces, picture quality - Nvidia cards

[Pob]

Having installed the latest Nvidia drivers, I am struggling to get the picture quality as good as it was before installing them I wondered what settings others use, as I want to make sure they are correct before I start calibrating the TV.
Previously I had my 8800GT outputting YCbCr444 to my Toshiba XV37 LCD - and all other options left at 'video player settings'- picture was fine.
But with the latest driver the same setting resulted in a muddy looking picture. The best I have managed to get is by setting the desktop to RGB, and in video settings selecting the dynamic range to limited (16-235). Although I have read a lot about colour spaces, black crush, whiter-than-white etc it just gives me a headache! At about the same time as installing the new drivers I also switched to PowerDVD decoder for my H264 TV, and using DXVA which means all colour / brightness changes have to be done in the Nvidia control panel. Also confuses things because I believe PDVD expands all video to 0-255, assuming I guess that everyone uses a monitor and not a TV.
So what is proper - RGB or YCbCr444, 0-255 dynamic range or 16-235?

[stustunz]

hey pob what driver version are you using
what are your tickers and panning like
i did a dumb thing and changed to the latest driver and they are shit

[JonnyCam]

and they are shit

So, thats your review then?
I won't bother up(?)grading.

What OS are you using with the new drivers?

[stustunz]

i have a nvidia8600 nvidia 9400
both on Xp
tried W7 over weekend but hated that also im sounding like a angry little man really

191.03 also tried 191.07
ive had this jumpy ghost thing going on tickers are jumpy as
thought it was the digital thing since i have to have it set to 60hz dumb samsung tv doesnt accept 50Hz on hdmi

curious to see what drivers others are using

still way better than any ati card

[Pob]

hey pob what driver version are you using
what are your tickers and panning like
i did a dumb thing and changed to the latest driver and they are shit

I agree about the latest drivers - I started getting reboots without any error messages, even though 'Automatically restart' on system failure is not checked in system properties. I did some reading on the Nvidia forums and many users said they keep having to go back to the 'last stable version', 185.85, so I installed this version on both XP and Windows 7 and have not had a problem since. However in either version I never noticed any problems with tickers or panning - they were always fine. I do switch between 50Hz and 60Hz refresh rate though depending on the content - 50 for TV& recordings & DVD, 60 for any American content in MKV's, AVI's etc. I tried using 24Hz for Blue-ray and MKV, but for some reason it causes bad judders, and 60Hz seems better which is weird because I thought BD and MKV's were 24fps natively - maybe it's the PowerDVD decoders...
Funny thing in 185.85 though - using 'video decoder settings' for colour range does result in the 16-235 colourspace, the reverse of the latest 19x Nvidia drivers where it resulted in 0-255. I have started to get used to 16-235, it gives less contrast than full RGB but I think it looks more natural. Another thing I noticed is that all the decoders that work with DXVA (PowerDVD in XP, Microsoft DTV decoder in Windows 7) seem to give a softer image than decoders using only software decoding - I have had to crank up edge enhancement to a crazy 57% in the Nvidia drivers to get it looking sharp enough...