Alternative to FSE to avoid screen tearing

[Deev8]

... you can get a PCH that has no problems displaying any HD recording you can throw at it.

Unfortunately that's not quite the case. A few of us have been pestering Syabas to provide support for New Zealand (and Norway) HD Terrestrial broadcast material. The PCH copes with the H264 video just fine, but it can't handle our HE-AAC audio.

So to be accurate the PCH has no problems playing the majority of HD recordings, but there are a couple of exceptions that won't affect a lot of GB-PVR users - but they are a real irritation if you happen to live in New Zealand or Norway.

[Etacovda]

I've pondered the idea of a back-end server with a PCH on the actual TV(s), but there are several things I'd really like to do that require a real PC at the main TV. If I have to reduce my feature set, this whole thing may not be worth pursuing.

I can't help but wonder how many people on GB-PVR actually get a tear- and stutter-free picture? I know different people have different acceptance levels for such things; for me the picture has to be 100% perfect, even the slightest stutter or tearing drives me up a wall. I've noticed for years now that many channels on DirecTV seem to drop a frame every few (or maybe it's the individual shows, I'm not sure), apparently to reduce bandwidth requirements... I can barely watch those channels, yet my wife has no idea what I'm talking about.

it took me freaken AGES to get a great picture, but now its very difficult to tell the difference between my straight Digital decoder input into the tv, and the htpc. I have zero jerkiness or tearing. FSE is the only way to get this to happen on my system. I use FSE with the nvidia decoder, Vsync forced to always on in catalyst control center, weave set on everything, all noise reduction + edge enhancement turned off, and hauppauge tweak tool to once again to remove any temporal/spatial noise reduction, as it adds a smeariness to the picture that i hate (looks like jpeg'ing)

Im exactly the same with the picture issues, cannot stand them at all - my partner cant see artifacts in the picture really, but she copes with my tweaking - but now ive got it to near perfect, she can see the difference.

Id love to not use FSE, but it works so much better that its a neccessary evil, i think.

[fuzzweed]

I'm with you guys in having to have a perfect picture (and the length of tweaking time it takes to achieve it!), but FSE just had too many other draw backs. Can't use the windows key to quickly bring up the start menu for 'emergency' maintainance, can't launch screensavers over the top, can't run gamezone etc. etc.
My Radeon 9550 was tear free although suffered from a tiny amount of stutter using VMR9 custom, MPA and MPV codecs, DVBT input and cyberlink mux. The nVidia cards (5200 then 5500) had horrible tear unless in FSE mode and also didn't like the MPA and MPV codecs. My new radeon 1650 is bordering on perfect again.
I think you also need to take a step back occasionally and get a look at a friends set-top or sky box. OK, they rarely seem to have any stutter or tearing issues but IMHO look universally awful and jpegy for overall picture quality.

[garymeds]

get vista, use windows aero and evr renderer. worked for me on my at x1650.

[tjb]

I've pondered the idea of a back-end server with a PCH on the actual TV(s), but there are several things I'd really like to do that require a real PC at the main TV. If I have to reduce my feature set, this whole thing may not be worth pursuing.

I can't help but wonder how many people on GB-PVR actually get a tear- and stutter-free picture? I know different people have different acceptance levels for such things; for me the picture has to be 100% perfect, even the slightest stutter or tearing drives me up a wall. I've noticed for years now that many channels on DirecTV seem to drop a frame every few (or maybe it's the individual shows, I'm not sure), apparently to reduce bandwidth requirements... I can barely watch those channels, yet my wife has no idea what I'm talking about.

I should have mentioned the first time - the PCH is for my 2nd TV. I have a GbPvr server in the basement that only does recording. I have a client that I have played with forever, but have never been able to get a perfect picture with VMR9 Custom renderer. It is perfect, however, with the overlay renderer, which I have eventually grown to be happy with. It has a few drawbacks, but still allows you to switch to other applications while PVRX2 is running (unlike FSE mode). I assume you have tried overlay mode?

[johnsonx42]

Id love to not use FSE, but it works so much better that its a neccessary evil, i think.

If I have to use FSE to get a decent picture, I may as well forget the whole thing. Too many things I want won't work with FSE.

get vista, use windows aero and evr renderer. worked for me on my at x1650.

I am running Vista, and have tested with EVR - it's CLOSE to perfect, but even there I still get the occaisional tearing (but nary a stutter - even news tickers are smooth as silk). If everything else were ok on EVR, I'd go with it.

However, as I've detailed in another thread, I also need an <AspectRatioMode> with a negative number in it to stretch certain broadcasts to fill my 4:3 big-screen TV which is not supported on EVR (VMR9 only). Some HD channels broadcast a 16:9 stream, but show a lot of 4:3 content; the result is a 4:3 frame in the middle of the TV with large black borders alll the way around. Even when the content is 16:9, it's almost always framed to be cropped to 4:3 - the extra background on the sides is just there to fill a 16:9 tv, so nothing is gained by showing the whole frame letterboxed on a 4:3 tv. I've tried going without the stretched aspect ratio, but it really isn't very satisfactory to me, and gets a very poor WAF score as well.

[stustunz]

what resolution are you using?

[johnsonx42]

what resolution are you using?

1024x768 via S-Video

[carpeVideo]

You may want to lower the resolution - you won't get 1024x768 out of S-video anyway.

Also have you tried FFDshow, and the MPC-HomeCinema decoders?
(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles..._id=170561)

[johnsonx42]

I guess I could try 800x600; there would be other unpleasant consequences to lowering the resolution (which is why I don't use component out - that's limited to 720x480 on an SDTV), but it would be nice to know if a lower resolution changes anything.

I have used ffdshow, all the same problems are present, plus it doesn't seem to work with the Auto aspect ratio mode (probably a setting somewhere in ffdshow to fix that, but I haven't pursued it since it doesn't otherwise fix any problems). I haven't tried MPC-HomeCinema.

Mostly I've given up trying new decoders, since the tearing and stuttering are consistent across all the ones I have. You'd think ATI's AVIVO decoder would be perfect on an ATI card, but no such luck.