Making it look "live": have you succeeded?

[Astrophysics]

So as nice as it is to have my PC be a nicely functional DVR thanks to GB-PVR, I have a minor complaint. While the programs I record (or view in timeshift mode) are certainly of a watchable quality, I can still tell that I'm watching something that my computer has recorded, rather than a channel I am viewing directly with my TV's tuner. This is most noticeable in the category of smoothness of playback: objects that move in a certain range of speeds (my guess is that this range corresponds to the order of 1 pixel per frame) are blurred on the PC, but crisp on TV -- this is most visible with scrolling text as in news tickers. My playback doesn't look obviously choppy as though the PC is struggling to keep up (see hardware list at the end of this post), but it just doesn't look as good as I'd like to think it could.

Have any of you been successful in making the computer "transparent," at the very least in live-preview mode but, more importantly, in the DVR operation that makes using a computer worthwhile? If so, what hardware and settings are you using? Do your results/approach depend on whether you are looking at analog or digital content?
Or, is this difference merely a "fact of life" that we, as homebrew PVR users, must merely come to accept as an intrinsic limitation of HTPCs?

Thank you for your guidance in this, and for your patience: I hardly feel I can be the first to have this problem or embark on this quest, and if I have overlooked another conversation thread on this topic, please point me in that direction.

I'm running an Athlon-64 LE 1600 on an AMD 740-based motherboard (integrated Radeon HD 2100 graphics), 2GB of DDR2-800, and a Hauppauge HVR-1800 tuner. Operating system is Windows XP Pro SP2; GB-PVR version is 1.2.9.

[stustunz]

download graph edit to see what your pc is using when you playback video
then use gspot to remove filters that you dont want to use or increase their priority

power dvd decoders (power dvd 7&8 )seem to be pretty good
the audio from power dvd doesnt seem as user friendly if you want more than stereo
i use nvidia audio decoder

also
turn off all extra antilaising etc under direct 3d settings
and set wait to vertical sync to always on
try and use the native resolution of your monitor so no up/downscaling needs to be done by the tv/monitor

[martint123]

I used to notice hopping on things like news tickers. Eventually I found the quartz.dll fix was the one that solved it for me. Indistinguisable from real TV now. Digital and analogue (although analogue is still a touch darker recorded than live).

[Bathman]

I have recently switched to Vista and this allows EVR playback which is hardware accelerated. I cannot state enough how much of an improvement it has made to picture quality. Stutter has totally gone. It is as smooth as the "live" TV transmission and no more tinkering around with quartz files etc

I would very much suggest that you try it.

[Deusxmachina]

are blurred on the PC, but crisp on TV -- this is most visible with scrolling text as in news tickers.

Scrolling text problems or blurry or "comb" people on movement are often/usually signs of bad deinterlacing. Ok, not "bad," just the wrong setting for the desired output.

Pretty standard that TVs can display these signals well. Meanwhile, the computer display likely needs the proper deinterlacing setting to look good.

At first, the mention of making it look "live" had me thinking of the difference between mpeg1 and mpeg2 and maybe you were recording to mpeg1 for some reason. Mpeg1 doesn't have interlacing and drops half the fields of each frame, so it always has that "film" look which doesn't look real, especially for sports.

[sgilani]

Most probably it's a deinterlacing problem. Use the DScaler decoder with deinterlacing set to Auto, it sends the proper interlacing flag in the video headers to the renderer... and your video card should then do hardware deinterlacing and it should look much better.

The Cyberlink decoders should also do so by ticking 'enable hardware acceleration', but DScaler is free and easy to test.

[pBS]

i also use evr in xp and it's also smooth as silk...
cpu stays less than 20% on hd...color seems better as well as de-blocking..

tho my osd text isn't *quite* as sharp in evr, not bad tho..probably cuz i'm using evr in xp....[just looks like font smoothing isn't on]

[frankmcg]

Does no one else get slight tearing with EVR or is that just me? Drove me nuts so had to go back to VMR9 FSE. That's on an nvidia 8500 with vsync on.

[mikeh49]

It might just be you! I had tearing with VMR9 on a Geforce 6200 when I increased the resolution to 1366X768 and switched to DVI out for a new TV. Had never seen tearing at 720X480 and S-video out. EVR fixed the tearing, but there were some other issues, so I went back to VMR9 and upgraded to a 9600Pro. Ultimately, I had to go back to DirectX 9.0b to get smooth video.

I used both PureVideo and Cyberlink 6 and 7 decoders during the above experience; no significant difference between them.

[sgilani]

its too bad that the video inset feature isn't possible with EVR