Video card drivers- ideal display settings

[pvrtinkerer]

Sub-

I've been hunting around, and can't find an answer, so I thought I'd ask you directly-

What screen resolution and color quality is GBPVR optimized for? I've been playing around with the permutations and there are definitely differences in OSD and pause behavior depending on whether the resolution is 640x480 or higher than that, and there are behavioral differences between 16-bit color and 32-bit color as well.

When you do your development, what are your video driver settings for this stuff?

[sub]

I'd definitely 32-bit colour, when it comes to resolution there isnt a clear cut answer.

I've got a couple flat panel screens, so I've been matching the resolution to their native resolution.

If you're on a tube tv and its use is dedicated to GB-PVR, then its probably worth going with 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL if you're able to.

[pvrtinkerer]

Thanks for the answer, sub... but...

What I'm experiencing on my tube tv is not jiving with what you just said...

When I'm playing content using directshow, it seems my resolution and color depth selections are ignored, and an ordinary color range and aspect ratio take over. I discovered this when I set the color depth to 8 bits and then picked play. It played right, with well more than an 8-bit range on the screen, but would throw an error whenever OSD was called complaining of an attempt to write to protected memory. OSD is more than 8 bits, right, so the 8-bit setting left too small a window for the osd info, which ended up trying to write to the registers after the 8 bits allocated to the video.

I've made the following observations:

at 640x480x32 I get no OSD at all in transcoded avis, but they play fine and when I hit pause the picture does freeze. I get and no picture from livetv with the preview selection turned on, but when I hit pause and timeshifting starts an OSD appears over a black screen, and then a picture appears after the OSD goes away. In recorded MPEGs I get the OSD-over-black-screen behavior. The OSD blackout only happens in 32-bit mode.

at 640x480x16 I get OSD everywhere I'd expect one, but when OSD comes onto the screen it overlays a black mesh over the entire screen image.

at 720x480x32 I get same behavior with live tv and OSD blackouts everywhere.

at 720x480x16 I get no OSD, but pauses have no mesh.

All this might be better demonstrated in a table format.

FWIW this is a GeForce 6200 256MB AGP card with a 128MB AGP window set in the BIOS. Forceware 84.12 drivers.

[sub]

I would bother with anything other than 32 bit colour.

zip and attach the logs showing this black screen problem you're getting with 720x480x32 and I'll take a look. Its probably related to either the video decoder or video renderer you're using.

[pvrtinkerer]

Have discovered this behavior is inconsistent. I can get either proper pauses with no OSD, or OSD on top of black screens.

Logs attached. Let me know if you spot anything.

[sub]

The first thing I'd recommend is set the deinterlacing back to 'encoder pass-through' on the misc tab of the config app.

If that doesnt help, then try switching from Overlay to VMR to see if the OSD comes right.

[pvrtinkerer]

Will try the pass-through option. Can't try the VMR, as this is a Win2K box.

[sub]

VMR9 is available on Win2k assuming you've installed DirectX9.

[pvrtinkerer]

Indeed it is... and it works like a charm. My setup is now totally satisfactory. Time to make an image of the install partition and put it away someplace safe. Thanks so much for all your work on this.