MPEG2 motion artifacts (Freeview NZ)

[siliconaudio]

I'm running GBPVR v1.2.13 on an AMD 5200+ PC on Win XP Pro SP3. Video card is an ATI HD2600 Pro. I watch the NZ FTA channels (Freeview) via a Twinhan AD-SE200 satellite tuner.

After trying various renderers, muxes and decoders (ATI, Cyberlink, etc), but still seeing a lot of jitter on movement, I decided that maybe it was just a limitation of the MPEG2 technology used for satellite broadcast. However, having compared my rig against a stand-alone satellite decoder, I'm now pretty sure my viewing experience is sub-par when it comes to motion, particularly camera pans, etc.

Is this just "the way it is" when it comes to PVRs, or is there a way to reduce the ugly artifacts during movement? I'm talking about the effect that causes a vertical line to blur and almost double during a horizontal camera pan.

I connect to a 42" plasma over HDMI, but have seen the same issue over VGA.

[sub]

Can you post a screenshot of these artifacts so we can see what you mean?

[siliconaudio]

Can you post a screenshot of these artifacts so we can see what you mean?

Sorry Sub, I've had a busy few days, but will grab a screenshot ASAP.

I enabled one of the live preview de-interlacing options in the misc options and things are looking quite a bit better. I have to admit though, that I'm a little confused of the best/correct place to set de-interlacing for GBPVR.

If I use the Cyberlink decoder, I can enable de-interlacing with hardware support in the decoder config. This fixes the horizontal slit effect, but gives me nasty jitter. On the other hand, the ATI Mpeg decoder gives much smoother horizontal movement, but I get intermittent jerkiness.

I can also enable the de-interlacing in GBPVR's misc options AND I can enable de-interlacing in the ATI Catalyst CC. I am wondering if maybe now I have double-ups of de-interlacing giving me problems.

The WIKI has very little info on the live preview de-interlacing options. If I have it enabled, should I disable it in the Mpeg decoder and/or CCC? I'm just a tad dazed and confused over this stuff. :confused:

[sub]

The 'deinterlacing' setting on the Misc tab only relates to analog capture devices, and is totally ignored with your satellite tuner. For analog users though, that setting should be set to 'encoder pass through'. In your case you dont need to worry about it though.

You can play with the decoder's deinterlacing settings though, to see what gives you the best picture.

[siliconaudio]

Just a quick update - I seem to have this problem totally solved now. I tried a few more codecs and finally found an older version of the Cyberlink decoder which has completely solved my problems. Turns out that I could never quite get the version that ships with Power DVD 7 to play ball, even with H/W acceleration enabled. It seems that picking the MPEG2 encoder that works best with you particular system is key. The nVidia Codec was close, but suffered slightly from tearing.