pvr150 picture quality

[ubu]

Please note however that GBPVR overrides the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE settings because the Intervideo decoder automatically generates a GBPVR key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER with default values which you need to edit.

Still couldn't find the automatically generated GBPVR key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER so I just created the neccessary keys in regedit and set the values as you suggested. I guess the Intervideo decoder must have found them because the difference is quite remarkable. I'm getting a really good picture now (slightly better than my Tivo using composite input; very close to my TV tuner with coax input from the wall). I guess I finally got to experience what happens when DXVA is enabled. My component cable should arrive shortly which will add icing to the cake.

Thanks so much for demystifying this stuff and giving me the "silver bullets" I needed.

This will help you (it works for me on 1.02-196)
http://www.9down.com/modules.php?name=Ne...t&sid=5676

Very handy site. It will surely help me "evaluate" certain items. I'm pretty pleased with the Intervideo decoder right now, but I guess I should give Purevideo another try, since my new Nvidia 6200 should be able to take advantage of its hardware acceleration/deinterlacing capabilities.

To summarise, for anybody reading this thread. I'm using a 6200 card (see signature for the rest of my hardware config) with an S-video tv out hookup to an SDTV. I'm using Intervideo non-CSS decoder v4.5.28.92 and the original (orange CD label) Hauppauge capture card driver. I have followed all of csy's suggestions in this thread. And I'm a happy camper!

[csy]

Happy to help out

PS, keep an eye on the Nvidia website for new drivers and Purevideo decoder over the next few weeks. Other Nvidia forums are talking about a new 90 series ForceWare driver and Purevideo decoder to compete directly against ATI's AVIVO. Here is a link to a review (in a foreign lauguage but you can get the drift). I'm hopeing this will resolve my jumpy motion problem on my 6600GT.
http://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/skvideo...index.html

[SirJYK]

Initial observations are that sharpness has greatly increased. I believe I am still experiencing loss of detail, especially noticable in low light scenes. I am not sure but it might be that a setting is being overdriven that is causing the brights to dominate the detail. I would like to adjust the settings on the fly, like I could before. But, since I have been monkeying with all the settings, anytime I playback a video or watch live tv it shows up on my crt as well as my tv, which makes adjustments more difficult. It doesn't display gbpvr menu on both monitors, which is puzzling. This is really annoying.

Also, when I untick "windowed mode" in gbpvr, there is an annoying white box around the video played on the tv. Do you know how to get rid of this? That picture is still smaller than the tv picture when doing an a-b comparison.

Thanks.

[csy]

I believe I am still experiencing loss of detail, especially noticable in low light scenes. I am not sure but it might be that a setting is being overdriven that is causing the brights to dominate the detail. I would like to adjust the settings on the fly, like I could before.

Black Level, otherwise known as ‘Brightness control’ adjusts the light-level of the grey-scale (shades of black). If the brightness control is too low, then all shades of black will merge together as a single black. The brightness control lifts or lowers the entire light-scale linearly, so if boost the dark levels by say 10%, this will also increase the bright levels by the same amount. White Level, otherwise known as ‘Contrast control’ adjusts the dynamic range of the grey-scale, meaning the maximum light-level obtainable compared to the lowest light-level (black). Computers represent light levels in a digital scale from 0-255. Digital video (eg MPEG2) uses a portion of this scale (16-235 from memory). Some video devices in the computer can map input light-levels to different output light-levels via their own brightness/contrast/colour controls, however remember the scale is limited to 0-255, so if you increase the brightness on say the video card, then you will compress the white levels at the top-end of the scale. All the components in your computer should be configured to pass the digital video light-levels transparently (default zero) and only adjust the brightness/contrast/colour on your TV. I highly recommend you use a professional video setup DVD, like Digital Video Essentials (2003 edition). The link below has an excellent article on this subject:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/printthre...ge=1&pp=30

But, since I have been monkeying with all the settings, anytime I playback a video or watch live tv it shows up on my crt as well as my tv, which makes adjustments more difficult. It doesn't display gbpvr menu on both monitors, which is puzzling. This is really annoying.

‘Clone’ mode duplicates Windows onto both screens, and the VMR renderer duplicates the video onto all active Windows screens. I am not aware of a way to have the video only on one screen when using VMR.

Also, when I untick "windowed mode" in gbpvr, there is an annoying white box around the video played on the tv. Do you know how to get rid of this? That picture is still smaller than the tv picture when doing an a-b comparison.

I have not experienced a white boarder before, so this is strange to me. SDTV’s overscan by 5-10% by nature, so do you see the Windows desktop extending beyond the edges of the TV sceen?
Does the GBPVR menu screens cover the entire Windows desktop on the monitor and extend beyond the TV screen edges?
Does the video cover over the entire GBPVR menu screens?

[danIrl]

Hi CSY:

>> SDTV's overscan by 5-10% by nature, so do you see the Windows desktop extending beyond the edges of the TV sceen?

I have using various nvidia cards and have always been able to adjust this with the control panel (using the zoom controls). I installed an ATI 9550 card the other day, and clicked "Video mode" as recommended (picture does seem better), but I cannot adjust the zoom controls when I do this. Do you know if it is possible to adjust it in video mode or are the video card controls locked?

Thanks Dan.

[psycik]

Hi i've been following this thread in the hopes I could get my picture qualtiy up on my Tv. It's an old 28" CRT running with a composite cable.

I tried forcing the resolution to 720x756 but couldn't get the screen to resize down to that resolution, it just dropped the bottom and right off the screen.

I run an NVidia MX440 card with the tv-out being the primary and only monitor. Should i expect it to resize correctly??

Thanks.

[csy]

I installed an ATI 9550 card the other day, and clicked "Video mode" as recommended (picture does seem better), but I cannot adjust the zoom controls when I do this. Do you know if it is possible to adjust it in video mode or are the video card controls locked?

Unfortunately not. The purpose of ATI 'video mode' is to directly map the horizontal pixel rows to TV scan lines, hence why that tick box only becomes available when the two match. It also disables anti-flicker. This results in sharper video. This is another compromise between Video and Windows on SDTV's.

I tried forcing the resolution to 720x756 but couldn't get the screen to resize down to that resolution, it just dropped the bottom and right off the screen.
I run an NVidia MX440 card with the tv-out being the primary and only monitor. Should i expect it to resize correctly??

I’m not sure why the video card is doing that, it is probably the Nvidia driver doing stupid stuff with the TV-out. The TV-out appears to be stuck on the wrong resolution or zoomed in/out. You could try going into the TV-out ‘device settings’ and there is a reset/default button that might work. I’ve had similar experiences and found the simplest solution to uninstall and reinstall the driver (this defaults any incorrect settings). As a troubleshooting step, you could try using clone mode with the monitor as primary (I presume it looks correctly on the monitor), and try switching to another TV-out interface type then switching back again might reset the resolution.

Also, when I untick "windowed mode" in gbpvr, there is an annoying white box around the video played on the tv. Do you know how to get rid of this? That picture is still smaller than the tv picture when doing an a-b comparison.

I’ve been giving this some more thought. Black bars or boarders appear if applications or decoders perform aspect ratio adjustments or underscan adjustments. I’m sure it is the Nvidia driver misbehaving. Perhaps a bug?

[ubu]

So I finally got my 6200 card hooked up to my SDTV with a component cable. The standard Forceware 84.21 driver from Nvidia only gave me a choice between S-video or composite TV-out, with no apparent support for the component adapter, but I came across the X-TremeG 84.21v2 driver which does recognise the component hook up.

The good news: a significant improvement in sharpness and color - as good as (if not better) than the TV's native tuner. The bad news: major underscan problems. The native Nvidia driver, when using S-Video, displayed a button on the TV configuration window (the same one you use to adjust the anti-flicker) that allowed me to shrink/expand the whole screen (not just move it up/down/left/right) which meant you could easily adjust for overscan/underscan. This button does not appear with my new setup. Strangely, if I adjust anti-flicker, the display (both desktop and video playback) switches to major overscan, such that the GBPVR menu display is cut off and the desktop task bar disappears off the bottom of the screen, But if I click on the button to return to the default setings and then adjust the anti-flicker again, the display switches to 10% underscan with a black border round the whole display (again, both desktop and video).

I'm trying to figure out if this is just a constraint of component TV-out as opposed to S-video or if it is a problem with this driver and I need to keep trying different releases and/or implementations until I hit one that both supports the component dongle and lets me adjust overscan. Given the amount of people with HTPCs, you'd think Nvidia would get its act together with TV-out support in its drivers.

Sigh!!!

[csy]

So I finally got my 6200 card hooked up to my SDTV with a component cable. The standard Forceware 84.21 driver from Nvidia only gave me a choice between S-video or composite TV-out, with no apparent support for the component adapter, but I came across the X-TremeG 84.21v2 driver which does recognise the component hook up.

Another GBPVR user reported the same problem on a different thread. He resolved it by using the Nvidia 84.43 Beta driver.

The bad news: major underscan problems. The native Nvidia driver, when using S-Video, displayed a button on the TV configuration window (the same one you use to adjust the anti-flicker) that allowed me to shrink/expand the whole screen (not just move it up/down/left/right) which meant you could easily adjust for overscan/underscan. This button does not appear with my new setup. Strangely, if I adjust anti-flicker, the display (both desktop and video playback) switches to major overscan, such that the GBPVR menu display is cut off and the desktop task bar disappears off the bottom of the screen, But if I click on the button to return to the default setings and then adjust the anti-flicker again, the display switches to 10% underscan with a black border round the whole display (again, both desktop and video).

I'm trying to figure out if this is just a constraint of component TV-out as opposed to S-video or if it is a problem with this driver and I need to keep trying different releases and/or implementations until I hit one that both supports the component dongle and lets me adjust overscan.

With all this feedback, it is becoming apparent to me that Nvidia is prone to problems with underscan on the TV-out. I have also experienced this problem and fixed it by clicking the default button within the TV Device Settings area.

I’m fairly sure component-out does not support overscan/underscan correction from a generic point of view (mine doesn’t).

The major overscan you speak of is normal I think. The SDTV overscan will cut-off the edges of the GBPVR menu screens and the Windows taskbar will fall below the edge of the screen (I make the taskbar double-height to compensate for this). The GBPVR menus can be adjusted to fit in the viewing area by adjusting the overscan settings in the GBPVR config.xml. This can optionally be applied to the video also, but I don’t recommend this. Remember the SDTV overscan is designed to have the TV picture (video) extend beyond the edge of the screen by 5-10%, and the pixel rows directly map to the TV scan lines under these circumstances. If you scale the video edges to the edge of the viewing area then the resolution is reduced (the pixel horizontal rows are squashed into less TV scan lines), resulting in reduced picture sharpness. So in summary I don’t recommend using driver zoom controls or underscan/overscan controls. SDTV’s are not designed for viewing computer windows screens - you really need an HDTV if you want that functionality.

Given the amount of people with HTPCs, you'd think Nvidia would get its act together with TV-out support in its drivers.

Yes I agree. They are working on it though. The new 90.xx driver is due to be released any day now, which apparently has significant improvements for Purevideo.

[stefan]

These are the registry tweaks for the Intervideo video decoder to enable and maximise hardware acceleration:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\Common\VIDEODEC\GBPVR]
"BOBWEAVE"=dword:00000000
"DXVA"=dword:00000001
"HWMC"=dword:00000001
"NVMCP"=dword:00000001
"VMR"=dword:00000002
"HwColor"=dword:00000001

I think I owe you big time, sir... I haven't tried this for long, but so far it looks splendid. I had some serious bleeding with red colors, stutters every 5 seconds in live tv, and general blaha going on. After applying these settings, things are looking a lot better Thank you so much. If you're ever in Stockholm, I'll buy you a beer