Video renderer woes

[seldomshaven]

I'm having trouble working out which video renderer to use.

The PVR PC is an AOpen XC Cube AV with a Celeron 2.6GHz processor, and I'm trying to keep the CPU usage down because the thermal fan control in the XC Cube seems to be hard-coded to run the thing at 70C, whereas it seems happiest at the 66C Intel rate it to and below.

Graphics card is an NVidia MX3000, running to VGA 640x480x32 output.

Video decoder is either Intervideo NonCSS decoder, or NVidia PureVideo - results seem pretty consistent regardless of which I tell gbpvr to use.

The problems I'm having with the various renderers are as follows:

1. Overlay (ideal for me - lowest CPU usage!) - the output is dark - saturation seems low & hue high. The bands on non-4:3 output are dark-purple rather than black. My gf is kinda Goth, though, so that's not so bad.
   
2. VMR7 - medium CPU usage, aspect-ratio description text doesn't change correctly.
   
3. VMR9 - high CPU usage, output has tearing
   
4. VMR9 Custom - high CPU usage
   
5. VMR9 Full-screen Exclusive - aspect-ratio is wrong when switched out of full-screen mode, e.g. back at menu. selecting "menu" and then TV Guide while TV is active switches back to TV, not to guide. when I first tested, it also had interlacing artefacts, although they seem to have gone now.
   

From these results, it seems to me that overlay is what I want, but that I need to sort the colours out. Does anyone know what component is responsible for that and/or how I go about fixing it?

[gEd]

You should be able to adjust the brightness and colour settings for overlay in your graphics driver.

The purevideo codec has a tab for these settings but accessing the codec via config.exe does not allow you to adjust them. I can;t see how to get at these settings.

I believe that direct.ini (in gbpvr folder) contains settings that allow you to control brightness, colour etc for analogue tuners. However this alters the settings of the recording not the playback.

[nitrogen_widget]

When you run GBPVR in window mode & watch MPEG2 a little Purevideo icon appears in the tool bar.

Double click on that & you will be able to get to the Purevideo config properties.

It will show you how much video data is being processed & you can adjust your picture settings on the fly.

[seldomshaven]

[quote=gEd]You should be able to adjust the brightness and colour settings for overlay in your graphics driver.
[QUOTE]

I'm actually using a Hauppauge Nova-T 500 dual-tuner DVB-T card.

It seems really bizarre that the overlay renderer can't be used without it changing the brightness & saturation. The other rendering methods are surely just plonking decoded pixels straight onto the screen?

I've poked about with the NVidia graphics card settings, albeit with some difficulty since their configuration app is rubbish and assumes a high-res display. Those settings don't seem to have any effect on my overlay-rendered TV/video, though. Playing back stuff through GBPVR while the settings panel is up fixes the colours, though, by preventing GBPVR from making use of an overlay...

[seldomshaven]

When you run GBPVR in window mode & watch MPEG2 a little Purevideo icon appears in the tool bar.

Double click on that & you will be able to get to the Purevideo config properties.

It will show you how much video data is being processed & you can adjust your picture settings on the fly.

I've tried switching GBPVR in windowed mode & playing back a DVB-T recording, but no Purevideo icon appears in the toolbar.

[carpeVideo]

You can also get to the pureVideo settings by using graphEdt and looking at your last graph and right clicking on the pure video decoder (make sure to register proppage.dll) - many settings require you to apply the settings, close the graph and reopen for the changes to really occur (I assume the same needs to happen when you are running GBPVR and make changes with the icon) so you can be fooled into thinking you made a change and it has no effect but it may really have an effect. This definitely is the case with hardware acceleration.

Also I have noticed if you set de-interlace to film it seems to have a positive effect on CPU usage to me (guessing it actually shuts it off)

Can't recommend multires (http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/multires.shtm) any more highly for changing res on the fly to help show the whole config screen (not while a video is playing though :0) I run on 848x480 most of the time so I can never see the entirety of any config app.

CV