"tearing" live TV with new laptop

[acidfiend2003]

I've done a forum search on this and didn't find any conclusive answers, so I thought I'd bring this issue up again and see if anyone has solved it in the meantime.

I've just got a new Athlon 64 Turion laptop, with the new Radeon Xpress 200 graphics chip. My previous laptop was a P4 with an ancient NVidia Geforce4 440GO.

When watching Live TV in a window, fullscreen or via the TV Out, pretty much any time there is fast horizontal or vertical panning/movement I get a visible "tear" in the screen about a quarter of the way down from the top.

I've tried the Hauppauge WinTV/cyberlink non-CSS MPEG2 decoder, the ATI/Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder and the Cyberlink PowerDVD MPEG2 decoder but it doesn't make any difference. I have also got the Nero MPEG2 decoder but this doesn't work well with GBPVR as I found out on my old laptop. I guess I could always install my old NVidia MPEG2 decoder but I'm not convinced that it is the decoder necessarily that is the problem.

Has anyone also had this problem and fixed it? anyone any suggestions?

Cheers
Dave

[stefan]

Is it an interlace issue? In that case DScaler might help:
http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/

[chud]

hmm, i think this tearing sounds more like a screen update issue. what is your screen refresh rate and how does it compare to the fps of your content? (and the refresh rate of your previous laptop if you still have it...)

[capone]

Use the TV/Vid out to plug into a TV/montior, and see if you still see it.

I had it on my TV for a while. It turned out I was overdoing the vid card, and it was running hot. You want to make sure it's not the display first before tearing things up.

You mention using the TV out, but what did you plug into?

[jam_zhou]

I have a 9600xt AIW and I solved my tearing issue by putting my screen resolution to 800x600 from 1024x768. It was a refresh and sync problem I think.

I think the ATI player and WinDVD automatically scaled the video to 800x600 regardless of what my video card resolution was set to. It also happened with my Radeon 9000.

Try this at least...it's easy.

[acidfiend2003]

The tearing is visible when Live TV is being viewed in a window on the laptop display, fullscreen on the laptop display and also (but most noticeably) when sent to the TV out to the s-video in of my TV.

The resolution of the TV out is set to 800x600, 60fps. I'm pretty sure I don't get tearing with recorded playback, and I'm pretty sure I don't get it with MPEG4/Xvid/DivX type material but haven't had time to do exhaustive testing.

Running hot is a possibility, the laptop does get pretty hot and the fan blows on/off at regular intervals while watching TV.

Cheers
Dave

[capone]

Easy way to test is to shut it down, let it sit a while (or just do this first after normal downtime), and watch live tv first thing beofre it can warm up (and as fast as possible in case you have a bad card that isn't cooling). If you start fine and it kicks in, that may be it.

It seemed to help after I turned off the GB screen saver. I think it was making the vid card work all the time, when normally it would just show a static menu overnight, etc. I can't say that for sure, but it stopped after turning that off (along w/ other things)

[j3flight]

I have a radeon as well and also see this tearing at normal desktop resolution. Dropping down to 800x600 for my tv output works great.

Not sure what's causing the tearing though, it's especially werid beause it's not all the way across the screen... the tear runs at an angle from about 1/4 of the way down on the left side to about the middle of the screen at the top.

[bow]

Hi acidfiend2003,
I had the exact same problem and had almost spent some money for a new graphic card.
Finally I found out that the tearing was totally unrelated to the graphic card or the decoder.
Two simple adjustments fixed the problem:
1. Turn off second display in windows settings
2. Do not use Aspect Ratio in gbpvr

hope it works for you too...

[acidfiend2003]

Not really sure I follow you - the tearing happens when I watch Live TV in a window as well as through the TV out, so I'm not sure that disabling the second display would help. As for aspect ratio, I tried all the possibilities and it tears just the same.

Cheers
Dave