Picture Tear

[zammo]

I have been using GBPVR for over a year with great success. I have a very minor issue on playback of live TV and recorded MPEG. Around the top quarter of the screen I get occasional "picture tear". The best way I could describe this is refreshing a screen in the middle of a refresh when motion is taking place and the top part reflects one frame behind the remainder of the frame. This is not consistent and appears variable but it does appear to affect the screen when there is motion or a lot of picture detail.

I have checked CPU load when playback and it rarely goes above 30% and is very consistent. I am using 2 x WinTV Nova-T USB, 1 x WinTV 350, MSI Pentium M mainboard with 1.8Ghz Pentium M, Asus Geforce 6600 0db PCI Express 16, 1 Gb memory, 2 x 250Gb SATA disc. I have Windows XP Home SP2 with all updates, latest Direct X, latest Nvidia drivers etc. I am using winDVD for MPEG2 codec. The display device is Pioneer 436SXE or Hitachi TX200 projector with DVI->HDMI driven with a 720p signal (1280x720).

When I playback DVD the playback is fine both within GBPVR and WinDVD and the picture is awesome. I have no other issues with picture quality or GBPVR operation and it provides excellent performance. Also no problems playing any xvid, divx, wmv or wmvhd content and all play flawlessly.

This is mildly annoying to be so close to perfection and not able to determine the reason for the picture tear. Does anyone have any ideas what would be causing this or see any problems or issues with the hardware setup I am using? Any information or help would be gratefully received ....

Thanks in advance!

[frankmcg]

Did you ever find a solution to this mate? I have EXACTLY the same problem with a NOVA-T PCI card, although outputing using S-VID rather than DVI. Again I've no problem with xvid/DVDs etc.

[acidfiend2003]

When I upgraded to my current laptop I had exactly the same problem - whereas on the previous machine all was well.

In the end, I found that selecting VMR7 instead of VMR9 fixed the problem. If you are using the Nvidia Purevideo decoder, you will need to select VMR7 in its preferences as well.

I can't say if this for sure will help - for me, it was a CPU issue as VMR9 was taking far too much CPU, hence the tearing. From what you say in your post it doesn't sound like this is an issue, but it might be worth a try.

HTH
Dave

[JonnyCam]

I had quite a bit of tearing with my Nvidia 5200 card. I replaced it with my ATI 9250 and it was reduced by a heap.

I have read others saying that ATI has less tearing. You should also look to see if the vertical sync is turned on or not.

Other than that - search for posts by Csy, he has given a lot of info on optimal settings for HTPC video.

[capone]

I had this when using the wrong resolution. I must have hit F11 by accident, and landed on something similar to 4:3

[Ted the Penguin]

the tearing issue with old nvidia cards is well known, I dont know about the newer ones though... switching to overlay mode should fix it

[frankmcg]

I'll give these suggestions a try when I get home tonight. Can't see it being a lack of CPU/GPU power though - am using an athlon64 3500+ with an onboard nvidia 6150.
On the resolution solution - I'm currently using 720x576 (native PAL TV resolution) which I was told is the right one to use for UK digital TV to optimise picture quality.

[capone]

I should say I mean to say ratio, not so much screen dimensions. I'm a clp of versions back, and there are less choices now, but it was the F11 button when watching video/tv.

I'll give these suggestions a try when I get home tonight. Can't see it being a lack of CPU/GPU power though - am using an athlon64 3500+ with an onboard nvidia 6150.
On the resolution solution - I'm currently using 720x576 (native PAL TV resolution) which I was told is the right one to use for UK digital TV to optimise picture quality.

[frankmcg]

Have spent a few days playing about with this and seem to have been able to improve it a bit. Changing the aspect ratio a few times gets rid of the worst of the problem ie the top 10% or so of the screen being a couple of frames behind, but I now have a new line appearing maybe 1/3 from the top of the screen. This only appears during fast sideways panning in programmes, it's not there at all on slower moving scenes. So I'm stuck again!

[sub]

Did you try the Overlay renderer? Your nvidia 6150 will probably cope better with this.