2007-09-01, 08:27 PM
Like many users, I had become quite obsessed with trying to get smooth TV and videos. Not especially smooth - but as smooth as a £10 freeview box or £15 DVD player.
After many, many hours trying all sorts of different drivers, decoders, deinterlacers etc. I decided to bite the bullett and reinstall windows:eek: . This is not something I took lightly. Many will be dismayed that I have upgraded windows versions for years - upgrading to ME from Win98, then upgrading to XP Pro. So I have not done a clean install since 1998! Have been through many motherboards, Cpu's, video cards and hard drives in that time, but using my trusted tools of Ghost (dos), regcleaner, and repair installs of windows I have never had an issue. So this shows how annoyed I was getting!
So now I had a clean install of XP, and the following:
Athlon 2600+
Hauppage Nova-T 9003
Nvidia FX5900
Nvidia 91.31 drivers
GBPVR 99.12
Dual monitors in clone mode - Primary 32" LCD running 720p @50Hz, secondary CRT@75Hz
For the purposes of testing I did not want to install anything else, so used the Intervideo Non-CSS decoders for video and audio, and the dvrms BDA multiplexor.
I then tried all possible settings in GBPVR, plus all the settings in the Hauppage primary tool.
What I found is that the only two combinations that gave acceptable (to me) performance were Overlay, or VMR9 FSE with DXVA and HWMC turned on. VMR 7, VMR9, and VMR custom gave me the same issues I had before (and again the juddering was made worse by turning DXVA on in these modes):confused:
So I used Ghost and reverted back to my usual Windows install, and found that the two working settings still worked the same - but with one exception. In VMR9 FSE the ticker text on the news channels had a horrible combing effect. As I had all settings the same as in the fresh install of Windows, I was puzzled until I remembered that I had changed the version of Quartz.dll as advised by some of the support threads. I changed it back to the newer 6.5.2600 version and the horrible combing was gone.
So the conclusion drawn from my painstaking experimentation is that VMR 7, VMR 9, and VMR custom are crap! And turning on DXVA makes them double crap! For me and my rig, anyway.
So now I am using VMR-FSE. I had been avoiding overlay and this mode - overlay because of the blocky text and the long delay before TV starts, and FSE because of it's quirky behaviour - like not getting the desktop back after quitting GBPVR and problems resuming from standby. But I am now satisfied with the TV and video picture.
Some other observations - once I had the 'good' setting, changing my LCD to 60Hz refresh rate made hardly any difference. I think juddering is often blamed on using 60Hz on LCDs in error.
But I still get much more noticeable judder if I try to use 1:1 pixel mapping on the LCD (1360*768). So I have to put this down to either my PC struggling with the slightly higher resolution, or the LCD itself. However the judder is also present on the secondary CRT so still not sure about 1:1 mapping.
So the ideal compromise for me is to use 720p for GBPVR, and 1360*768 for my desktop - to achieve this I found more usefull info from the support forums and use Reschanger.exe to launch GBPVR in 720p, and when I close GBPVR it goes back to 1:1. I do this from the green button on my remote and an edited Irremote.ini:
;GBPVR------------------------------------------------
GRNPOWER={run(C:reschange.exe -width=1280 -height=720 -refresh=50 "C:\Program Files\devnz\GBPVR\GBPVR.exe")}
Pob
After many, many hours trying all sorts of different drivers, decoders, deinterlacers etc. I decided to bite the bullett and reinstall windows:eek: . This is not something I took lightly. Many will be dismayed that I have upgraded windows versions for years - upgrading to ME from Win98, then upgrading to XP Pro. So I have not done a clean install since 1998! Have been through many motherboards, Cpu's, video cards and hard drives in that time, but using my trusted tools of Ghost (dos), regcleaner, and repair installs of windows I have never had an issue. So this shows how annoyed I was getting!
So now I had a clean install of XP, and the following:
Athlon 2600+
Hauppage Nova-T 9003
Nvidia FX5900
Nvidia 91.31 drivers
GBPVR 99.12
Dual monitors in clone mode - Primary 32" LCD running 720p @50Hz, secondary CRT@75Hz
For the purposes of testing I did not want to install anything else, so used the Intervideo Non-CSS decoders for video and audio, and the dvrms BDA multiplexor.
I then tried all possible settings in GBPVR, plus all the settings in the Hauppage primary tool.
What I found is that the only two combinations that gave acceptable (to me) performance were Overlay, or VMR9 FSE with DXVA and HWMC turned on. VMR 7, VMR9, and VMR custom gave me the same issues I had before (and again the juddering was made worse by turning DXVA on in these modes):confused:
So I used Ghost and reverted back to my usual Windows install, and found that the two working settings still worked the same - but with one exception. In VMR9 FSE the ticker text on the news channels had a horrible combing effect. As I had all settings the same as in the fresh install of Windows, I was puzzled until I remembered that I had changed the version of Quartz.dll as advised by some of the support threads. I changed it back to the newer 6.5.2600 version and the horrible combing was gone.
So the conclusion drawn from my painstaking experimentation is that VMR 7, VMR 9, and VMR custom are crap! And turning on DXVA makes them double crap! For me and my rig, anyway.
So now I am using VMR-FSE. I had been avoiding overlay and this mode - overlay because of the blocky text and the long delay before TV starts, and FSE because of it's quirky behaviour - like not getting the desktop back after quitting GBPVR and problems resuming from standby. But I am now satisfied with the TV and video picture.
Some other observations - once I had the 'good' setting, changing my LCD to 60Hz refresh rate made hardly any difference. I think juddering is often blamed on using 60Hz on LCDs in error.
But I still get much more noticeable judder if I try to use 1:1 pixel mapping on the LCD (1360*768). So I have to put this down to either my PC struggling with the slightly higher resolution, or the LCD itself. However the judder is also present on the secondary CRT so still not sure about 1:1 mapping.
So the ideal compromise for me is to use 720p for GBPVR, and 1360*768 for my desktop - to achieve this I found more usefull info from the support forums and use Reschanger.exe to launch GBPVR in 720p, and when I close GBPVR it goes back to 1:1. I do this from the green button on my remote and an edited Irremote.ini:
;GBPVR------------------------------------------------
GRNPOWER={run(C:reschange.exe -width=1280 -height=720 -refresh=50 "C:\Program Files\devnz\GBPVR\GBPVR.exe")}
Pob