Owen,

Please check following points:

1. The DScaler help text says Sharpness filter should be used for video source; do they mean VCR source or DVD?
If it is for VCR video source then DScaler Sharpness filter should not be used. What do you think?

2. Regarding your comments on using WinDVD 4.5 /5.0; I have WinDVD 5 demo and WinDVD 4.0; when I checked for the in ZoomPlayer it is picking up ivvideo.ax file from …\Common\Bin location where ivvideo.ax from WinDVD 5.0 having same file size; So I assume ZoomPlayer is using the latest ivvideo.ax from WinDVD 5.0; Can you please confirm file size & Create Date of ivvideo.ax file from your HTPC?

3. from your previous post, you suggested to Use overlay mode in stead of VMR9 and then use the sharpening method; can you please enlighten me why to use overlay or what is the difference between Overlay and VMR9?

The main difference is that VMR eats a lot more CPU. On an ATI card they look very similar, but overlay is inferior on other cards.

Thanks Mastiff.

I'm wondering why VMR9 takes up so much more CPU when they're supposed to be taxing on the video card's shaders...? But I do however notice that its true - it IS much more CPU intensive.

tbhavsar,
You disapoint me.

I quote myself from only two days ago.

"Using filter setting that others are using, thinking that this will give you the best result is the worst kind of folly.
Displays, personal taste and system capabilities differ so greatly that it is pointless.
You MUST experiment yourself to find the best settings for your system. It takes time, but it’s the only way."

As a general rule resize to your display resolution (1280x720) or Double DVD resolution (1440x1152PAL or 1440x480NTSC).
You should go back and read this thread from about page 6.

The default setting for Descaler sharpen is 127 for a reason.
A settings of 40 is not going to do much. And if you use it after resize it will do almost nothing at 40.

WinDVD 4.5 and 5 are about the same quality so it does not matter which one you use.

Sometimes I think I am wasting my time.


Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize - sharpen dude

Ok...I've read to page 8 of this thread, and finally asked myself this question:

What scaling/resize algorithm do the Radeons use? Is it really that much "worse" than using the bicubic resize filter in ffdshow? I just can't imagine them being that different from one another.
I would hope that Radeon hardware used some sort of bicubic/bilinear filtering for scaling purposes....

-Ryan

I'm curious about resolution resizing in FFDSHOW. I got it all working nicely with TT last night at 1440x960 but I've noticed I can't go any higher with the horizontal resolution. For instance if I try 1920 in the first box the box turns red and the last time I did that FFDSHOW refused to start properly and TT crapped out. In fact I may be remembering that above horizontal number wrong, it might have been even smaller to the tune of 1280... But any insights into the box turning red issue would be appreciated.

Any insights into that?

Originally posted by cowtown
I'm curious about resolution resizing in FFDSHOW. I got it all working nicely with TT last night at 1440x960 but I've noticed I can't go any higher with the horizontal resolution. For instance if I try 1920 in the first box the box turns red and the last time I did that FFDSHOW refused to start properly and TT crapped out. In fact I may be remembering that above horizontal number wrong, it might have been even smaller to the tune of 1280... But any insights into the box turning red issue would be appreciated.

Any insights into that?


I think it's because the resolution needs to be divisible by 16. 1920 is, but 1080 is not....Maybe it's assuming that you want to keep 16x9 aspect?

-Ryan

Sometimes I think I am wasting my time.

come on Owen, don't get down, i for one look forward to your posts


Steve

:)

I find that it doesn't need to be a multiple of 16, though I'm not sure why. The "red issue" will only appear if its an odd number, at least, from the limited values I've entered that seems to be the case. I was resizing to 1200x900 before(900 isn't a multiple of 16) and it worked.

RyanDinan,

In stead of asking questions about how ffdshow resize compares to Radeon hardware, just get in there and use it to find out for yourself.

Bicubic is not the best resize algorithm for starters (read the thread).
Lanczos is a good compromise between quality and CPU load. It’s definitely better then Bicubic.
Video cards don’t sharpen during the resize process like ffdshow can etc.

If you find that ffdshow resize is no better then hardware resize on your system then don’t use it and be happy.
Its all about what looks good to you on your system, not what looks good to others on there’s.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude.

Maybe this should go somewhere else but anyways.

Even though WinDVDs bob deinterlacing mode is really really good, forcing weave is just slightly better. With the WinDVD 5 filters (and older too I am sure), go to the filter registry area and set the bobweave setting to 2 to force weave.

Its very slight but its an improvement as far as I can see.

Check it out you guys with massive screens and see if it helps. It definitely doesn't do any harm :)

Now all we need is a force progressive or even better, a proper auto setting that will choose between the two.

Originally posted by Owen


Bicubic is not the best resize algorithm for starters (read the thread).
Lanczos is a good compromise between quality and CPU load. It’s definitely better then Bicubic.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude.

Owen,

which one is the best resizing method? Spline?

Spline is the best as far as I can see but uses alot of cpu power, then probably lanczos, followed by bicubic and experimental.

Originally posted by Mark Kennedy
Spline is the best as far as I can see but uses alot of cpu power, then probably lanczos, followed by bicubic and experimental.

Mark, what differences can you see between spline and Lancsoz?

Michele, its almost impossible to see a difference with full moving video so I just use the menus from some disks to compare. I used the menu from the StarWars Episode II disk as I find it is one of the disks that I never have problems with freezes etc.

By menu I mean where Play, Chapter Selection is etc.

With Lanczos the menu looked good but with Spline I could see the text becoming much clearer. One thing I noticed also was that around the text in the menu, a bluish area becomes very prominent with lanczos, and with spline it becomes even more prominent. Looking at the original source and zooming in, there is a slight hint of blue there but nothing like this.

To get rid of that problem with spline being used I took down my Chroma Sharpen setting from 1.7 to 1.0 and all is still very detailed without that (what I consider to be a) negative effect of over enhancing some things.

Originally posted by Mark Kennedy
Michele, its almost impossible to see a difference with full moving video so I just use the menus from some disks to compare. I used the menu from the StarWars Episode II disk as I find it is one of the disks that I never have problems with freezes etc.

By menu I mean where Play, Chapter Selection is etc.

With Lanczos the menu looked good but with Spline I could see the text becoming much clearer. One thing I noticed with spline also was that around the text in the menu, a bluish area becomes very prominent with lanczos and with spline it becomes even more prominent. Looking at the original source and zooming in, there is a slight hint of blue there but nothing like this.

To get rid of that problem with spline being used I took down my Chroma Sharpen setting from 1.7 to 1.0 and all is still very detailed without that (what I consider to be a) negative effect of over enhancing some things.

very clear explanation mark!

With full moving video i can see the difference between HW resize (ati one) and Lancsoz.
Probably spline method is intrinsecally more sharper and detailed than bicubic or Lancsoz, so you need to move down the sharpness filter.
Do you also use unsharpmask or another sharpness filter after resize? i use unsharpmask at 20 with 1152x862 resolution (so resize is setted at 1152x864 lancsoz, and sharpening during resize is 1.2 both chroma and luma)

No I use Blur and NR first, Denoise set at 30.

Then I resize to 1280x1024 with Spline, Luma Sharpen 1.7 and Chroma Sharpen 1.0. This gives me about 90% CPU usage so anything more and I would start losing frames, and thats with an Athlon XP at 2.7ghz.

Mark what ffdshow version do you use? I read that some versions are better for athlon. Have anyone tried Sinc? Owen what sharpening method do you consider the best, Lanczos, Spline or Sinc, cpu usage aside?

My version is the latest alpha release from the ffdshow sourceforge site, its ffdshow-20030523.exe. I have tried even newer releases from some site but they are all beta, are very smooth (most of the time) but have some serious problems with jerky video some of the time too so the next version should be very good.

I have tried sinc as someone said it was the best but I get horrible vertical lines in the image with it enabled.

Some people commented that the Dec 02 build was the fastest. I'm currently using it and its at least as fast as the 0523 build.

IXUS,
In theory the order of resize quality should be Sinc, Spline, Lanczos.
Sinc is unusably slow.
Spline seems just a little better then Lanczos but the extra CPU it requires is not worth the very small improvement IMHO.
I would rather use the spare CPU to run Descaler sharpen before resize, Gradual denoise after resize etc.
Even on my P4 3.3Gig 942FSB duel channel DDR system I cannot use Spline smoothly without compromising on other ffdshow settings. I’ll have to wait for the next generation of CPU.
If you can run Spline smoothly, without compromising on other filters or settings then by all means go for it.

P.S. I use the 0523 build.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Originally posted by Owen
IXUS,
In theory the order of resize quality should be Sinc, Spline, Lanczos.
Sinc is unusably slow.
Spline seems just a little better then Lanczos but the extra CPU it requires is not worth the very small improvement IMHO.
I would rather use the spare CPU to run Descaler sharpen before resize, Gradual denoise after resize etc.
Even on my P4 3.3Gig 942FSB duel channel DDR system I cannot use Spline smoothly without compromising on other ffdshow settings. I’ll have to wait for the next generation of CPU.
If you can run Spline smoothly, without compromising on other filters or settings then by all means go for it.

P.S. I use the 0523 build.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Owen,

I'm using ffdshow with unsharpmask at 23 after resizing at 1152x864@50hz with chroma and luma sharpness at 1.23
No other filter used on a Athlon XP Barton 2500+ nforce2 dual channel 512mb corsair CL2.
At present CPU consumption it's around 65%, do you think i can move to spline or better to sinc?

Can you also tell what difference can you find (both experimental and theoretical) between lancsoz, spline and sinc?

Thanks!

I tried both Spline and Sinc on my system: they stutter like every second, not usable at all.
The strange thing is cpu load decrease in respect to Lancsoz:confused:

How are you viewing your CPU load? Task Manager isn't accurate enough since the time resolution isn't high enough. Use the ffdshow OSD to view your actual CPU utilization. When I get too ambitious and apply too many filters, it gets pegged at 100%, resulting in either massive stutters, or a slow motion video and regular speed audio(i.e. not synched at all).

Originally posted by Goi
How are you viewing your CPU load? Task Manager isn't accurate enough since the time resolution isn't high enough. Use the ffdshow OSD to view your actual CPU utilization. When I get too ambitious and apply too many filters, it gets pegged at 100%, resulting in either massive stutters, or a slow motion video and regular speed audio(i.e. not synched at all).

Goi, thanks for your help! In fact i was using taskmanager, i'll comeback and try again with ffdshow osd.

Michele Spinolo,

Quote:

“Can you also tell what difference can you find (both experimental and theoretical) between lancsoz, spline and sinc?”

Come on man, I have better things to do then spend my time answering your question when you could answer it yourself just by USING the different algorithms yourself.
I have already expressed my opinion on these resize options.

Quote:

“Sinc is unusably slow.
Spline seems just a little better then Lanczos but the extra CPU it requires is not worth the very small improvement IMHO.”

Personally I don’t care what the CPU usage is as long as I don’t get any stutters.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Owen,

What ffdshow version should we use?
Is there PQ difference between ver.0523 and the ver.0103?

Thanks for your resize-sharpen method, I use that method right now with TT and the resulting picture is stunning.:)
Before that I don't like to use ffdshow (maybe because I use unsharp mask).

Maybe I missed this in the thread...but do you have to have Dscaler installed in order to have the Dscaler NR filter in ffdshow? Because I can't seem to find it anywere in ffdshow....

Thanks!

-Ryan

Originally posted by RyanDinan
Maybe I missed this in the thread...but do you have to have Dscaler installed in order to have the Dscaler NR filter in ffdshow? Because I can't seem to find it anywere in ffdshow....

Thanks!

-Ryan

You can install the whole Dscaler program or just the Dscaler filter.

Ok. I've read and read and read and I think I'm starting to go crosseyed..

Unfortunately I still don't think I'm grasping everything and if I cold get a succint, or close :D, answer then that would be great.

Here is what I have

P4-2.53
P4C800 Deluxe
1GB PC3200 Ram
Radeon 9800 Pro
Toshiba TW65H80 RPTV at 1920x540p for DVD Playback (1920x1080 just doesn't look good IMO)

I'm really very confused as to what to set the resize resolution to be.

From reading this massive thread here is what I currently have (in this order)

Unsharp Mask - 18
Resize - 1280x720
Luma - 1.3
Chroma - 1.3
Gradual Denoise - 18

The system tends to be a little jumpy and the OSD on FFDShow is pegged at 100%.

Any help?

Thanks

Josh

JoshFink,
For starters, see if you can overclock the P4 to 3Gig plus. You will need as much power as possible.

Then in this order:

Deinterlace (If Required. It is normally not. 5 Tap low pass recommended)

Picture Properties (If required)

Levels (if required)

Descaler Filter, Sharpen. (Start at default setting of 127 and adjust as required. You will need to download Descaler to get the filter)

Resize (Try both 1440x960 for NTSC AND you DESKTOP resolution to see which works best.)

Resize sharpen (Lanczos, Luma 1.5-2.0 Croma 1.5-2.0)

Gradual denoise (30-50)


I do not recommend any of the filters under the Sharpen tab in ffdshow.
Descaler sharpen is much better a bringing out REAL detail not just high lights.

The settings mentioned here are a guide ONLY.
They are suited to CRT displays. For digital displays go easy on the sharpening. Especially Descaler sharpen.

Good luck and have fun.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Anyone else use the swscaler option to sharpen?

Its basically the same as resize sharpen except you can go up to 4.

I have to say its quite amazing.

Owen, have you ever thought about writing a sticky FAQ in the forum (maybe that's rather difficult to get permission for?) or a FAQ on a website, so you won't have to answer the same questions again and again? If you want to, I can probably host it (as long as it's HTML format) on my website. :cool:

Eeeesh...

I just went back to ffdshow version 20030103, as it was faster than 20030523 (the only two I know of that work with TheaterTek).

Anyawy - I only turned on resize (to 1920x1080) via fast bilinear mide and adjusted the luma/chroma sharpen to 1.2 and 1.5 respectively.

With only this, my P4 1.8GHz (the older Willy core - not very overclockable) and Asus P4S533, Radeon 9000np is barely able to achieve smooth playback. I get a few hiccups - normally on scene changes - but for the most part, it's smooth. With the newer version of ffdshow, I couldn't even get this combo to work...

I would have thought that I'd at least be able to run bicubic or lanzcos mode, with the gradual denoise filter first. Is this typical performance with my setup?

Anyway - I'm not seeing any difference in the luma/chroma sharpening. I can go and move the sliders all the way up and down while the movie is playing, hit apply on both the ffdshow and TT windows, and I see no change. Should there be an obnoxious setting that would show me if the filter is really doing anything?
Also - can you use the luma/chroma sharpen even if you don't resize via ffdshow? Or do you have to have that resize box checked?

Thanks!

-Ryan Dinan

I think you're resizing too much Ryan...with an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz I'm able to resize to 1024x768 EXP with sharpness or denoise, or Lanczos only. Anything beyond that is unusable. I would expect a P4 1.8GHz to be about as fast.

Owen does it matter which dscaler version i use for sharpening? You say to start at 127, what setting do you use at the moment? I`m also wondering what kind of display you use with your htpc?

Mastiff,
The sticky FAQ sounds like a good idea. It would help the new people quickly find what they are looking for. And save me some time.
I have no idea how I would get this happening.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

IXUS,

Owen does it matter which dscaler version i use for sharpening?

No

You say to start at 127, what setting do you use at the moment?

You should know better then to ask that question. But I will grant your request, 135.
Don't you dare use that setting. I have a patent pending. :D

I`m also wondering what kind of display you use with your htpc?

CRT rear projector

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

I would like a Dscaler/ffdshow FAQ because I've been searching 2 forums for information on how to have ffdshow recognize Dscaler. I've got both loaded onto my computer but if I go into ffdshow there are no adjustments under the Dscaler filter. Although I've gotten ffdshow and TT to work together well, Dscaler and ffdshow is new to me. I use the 5/23 version of ffdshow and I downloaded the 401 alpha version of Dscaler. Any help would be appreciated, and I'll continue to search.

Ryan,
You are being way to ambitious with your resize settings.
The old 1.8 is not up to the task. If it is using SDRAM you will have no chance. A P4 will SDRAM is SLOOOOW.
Try much more conservative resize settings or do not use resize at all.
If you just want to sharpen, then try Descaler Sharpen.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Glimmer Man,
It is really very easy.
Just open ffdshow and go down to the DScaler filter tab.
Open it and click the button to the right of the “Filter” box and browse to where you installed Dscaler and select the filter .dll of choice.
Check the “DScaler filter” box and you are done.
Happy Dscaleing. :D

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Thanks Owen, I'm on it!

Owen, It worked lika charm! are each one of those filters usable for DVD sharpening?, It looks like tweaker nirvana. Thanks!

Originally posted by Owen
Ryan,
You are being way to ambitious with your resize settings.
The old 1.8 is not up to the task. If it is using SDRAM you will have no chance. A P4 will SDRAM is SLOOOOW.
Try much more conservative resize settings or do not use resize at all.
If you just want to sharpen, then try Descaler Sharpen.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude


Well, Im using DDR SDRAM if that makes any difference :).
I can do 1920x1080i with fast bilinear fairly well - In fact I watched a whole movie last night without noticing any skips/pauses.
However, I'd still like to know if I can use the luma/chroma sharpening even if I don't resize....Is that possible? Because I honestly don't even see a difference with Spline selected (except that it's choppy as hell). I see no added detail....
Right now while resizing and using luma/chroma sharpening (1.0 and 1.5 respectively) I cannot notice any difference in sharpness either....

I tried the Dscaler filters - which by the way, if you go to the directory where you installed Dscaler and pick a filter, they ALL show up in the drop down menu afterwards. In fact, I'm not sure how to make sure only the ones I want are really running...?

Thanks!

-Ryan

Resize takes a while to notice. At first I didn't see what the big deal was too, after a while of getting used to it, with the luma/chroma sharpening and dscaler sharpness filter, and then going back to nothing at all, I could see a clear difference.

OOPS! Sorry Owen, I was in the wrong spot, but I'm ok now... Thanks again.

RyanDinan,

DDR SDRAM is fine.
Forget about using 1920x1080 on that machine. Unless you have your desktop at 1920x1080 it would be a waste of time anyway.
You could try 1440x960 but I thing that will still be to much for your CPU.
1152x960 could be a good option and let the video card resize to your desktop res. This may sound strange but trust me it can work. Vertical resize is more important then horizontal. 1152x960 is a 1.6 horizontal and 2.0 vertical resize and is a good compromise.
Spline is a waste of time and definitely not an option for you. Stick with Lanczos if you can.
Don’t be afraid to use Luma 2.0 and Croma 2.0. Resize sharpen is VERY subtle so 1.0 will be difficult to notice for many people.

DScaler Sharpen filter is the only one worth using. It should be the one shown when you open the” DScaler Filter” section of ffdshow.
If you cant run Resize sharpen and Dscaler sharpen together due to CPU constraints, try using DS sharpen on its own.

Gradual denoise is useful if the CPU is up to it. Not likely for you.

I consider a 2.5Gig machine a minimum for effective ffdshow use.
For ffdshow use at HD TV resolution (1920x1080) a 3Gig + P4 with fast RAM is only just adequate.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Glimmer Man,

You had me worried for a minute there. :D

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Hey Guys,
Quick question probably already answered in the thread, but can't seem to locate the answer. I am trying to use ffdshow with Zoomplayer pro and the windvd filters and getting the video freezup. I read that the Abstract DMO filters need to be set to zero to fix this issue. Is this in ffdshow or ZP and how do I do this?

Originally posted by Maggie Guy
Hey Guys,
Quick question probably already answered in the thread, but can't seem to locate the answer. I am trying to use ffdshow with Zoomplayer pro and the windvd filters and getting the video freezup. I read that the Abstract DMO filters need to be set to zero to fix this issue. Is this in ffdshow or ZP and how do I do this?


Page 6, last reply.

There are two registry files that you can run to set the Abstract DMO to 0.


Jared

Thanks Guys,
But I already downloaded the files from BBQ's website and I also added the two registry entries as stated in another thread. Still getting the video freeze on ZP with Windvd filters selected.

Owen, Dscaler sharpen before resize has taken my display to another level. All my reference disks look EQUALLY good and that is a result, up to now, I was unable to achieve. Thanks and...
peace out-

Have not tried Powerdvd filters since installing the files because I was under the impression that the Windvd filters were superior. Last time I tried them I had some vertical-distorted green lines with a barely visible image, but it was not locked up. I also have a trial version of Theatertek that expires today and ffdshow works with it although I have been resizing to 1440 X 960 and the video stutters. It looks much improved! I would prefer to stay with ZP if I can get everything working.

Maggie Guy,
If you run WinDVD and adjust the abstract filter to 0, the setting is saved in the registry and will be used when the abstract filter is loaded by Zoom Player.
It may be a good idea to adjust the filter to a high setting (it will look disgusting) so you can check that it is actually working in Zoom Player. Then readjust to zero.
With Zoom Player running you can right click and select “Filters Properties” from the menu. You should see the abstract filter listed. If you don’t see it. It is not running.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Glimmer Man,
Glad to have another satisfied customer. :D
You should try WinDVD 4.5 or 5.0 video decoder filter in Zoom Player.
Its a step up from the Sonic filter in TT.

You had better tie yourself to a length of rope and secure the other end to something solid in your home. You may be inclined to step into the picture and wander off. You will need the rope to find your way back. ;)

Be carefully. All these improvements in one week could make your brain explode. :D


Cop ya latter dude,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude;)

after a clean install i get this green scrambled mess with ffdshow selected in zoomplayer. i get this only with dvd's. using windvd filters i get only a black screen, the green is with nvdvd, with sonic it jsut crashes. i have never had any problems with ffdshow until just now. the attachment is what it looks like. i have skimmed through this giant thread and i do not have it correcting the aspect ratio. any ideas? your help is greatly appreciated. thanks

I am new to ZP and ffdshow. I have nvDVD and PowerDVD installed. Either looks good when selected as the video decoder, until I add ffdshow. Then I get the same green mess as Bulldogbreed.

I followed the instructions on page1 of this thread, but have only skimmed through the rest of the posts, and happened to see that the very last post addresses this very issue, so I apologize if this has already been covered.

TIA,
Gerald

I'll add that I have an ATI 9800 and Catalyst 3.6, and that the green bars appear even if I have nothing selected in the left panel of ffdshow.

the thing that is really bothering me is that it was working great with every decoder before i re-installed xp :( and i have no idea what is different now lol any ideas will be appreciated

winxp
zoomplayer
myhtpc
various dvd decoders/filters trying to get one to work
athlon xp 2400+
512 corsair ddr 2700
radeon AIW 8500dv
hercules game theater xp
that's the relevant info i can think of right now

Hi!

If I want to use WinDVD Video filter with ffdshow, can I use my Zoomplayer 2.8? Or I must get the ZP 3.x to get it work? (coz I saw that I need to enable some abstract filter to make it work, but how can I include that filter in the graph?) THANK!

Bulldogbreed, I read in some other posts that it may have something to do with hardware accel being turned on. Now I have no idea how to turn it off, I cant find anything about HW accel in ZP properties.

Going to bed now, maybe I'll dream the answer...

yeah i saw that as well. i have hw accelleration turned off on all the decoders. maybe i will stumble on what i did to make it work on my last os install. who knows lol

Owen....Don't tell me that!!! ;) Now I'll have to try it. Well, once again it's
PLAYTIME!!!

Finally got it to work using Powerdvd 4.5 filters after modding the registry.
Resizing to 1440 X 960 and then my video card takes it to 1280 X 720 before going to my CRT on a 16:9 screen. Plays pretty good, but not always perfectly smooth. If I want to resize to my native resolution 1280 X 720, what changes need to be made in ZP to get the image to fill the entire screen?

Bulldogbreed: If you run your DVD player (not ZP), then go into the video settings, you can disable HW accel from there.

I tried that last night to turn it off for nvDVD, but it didn't help. I did not try it for PowerDVD since it didn't solve it for the nvdvd.

I have only had nvDVD for a day or so, and it is an eval at that, so maybe I am missing something, or something is different in the evaluation?

I am assuming that opening the nVidia player and unclicking hw accel is actually making changes in the registry, right?

Maybe I will try yet another video decoder... what I really want to avoid is video-card driver roulette.

Chances are that using an evaluation version cripples the decoder in some way. Get a full version of the software. I think the average for WinDVD and PowerDVD is around $70, but you can get one or the other in bundles with other software, or with DVD-ROM/R/RW drives. NVDVD might be cheaper, I don't know. Some of the NVDVD team posted here not too long ago saying they had some tricks up their sleeves for the next version, but they couldn't give us a release date. You might have to wait until Nvidia releases their new chipsets. AFAIK, the quality levels are, from highest to lowest:

WinDVD
NVDVD
Sonic
PowerDVD
Others :)

The top three are all very close in PQ, but there are noticeable improvements. Best bang for your buck would most likely be the Sonic filters, which are only $20.

Originally posted by JBlacklow
Bulldogbreed: If you run your DVD player (not ZP), then go into the video settings, you can disable HW accel from there.

thanks, but... i have already done that before i posted :) can you think of anything else? all ideas, thoughts, and help are appreciated.

i wonder if i try a different version of ffdshow if that will help?

For the people having trouble with ffdshow,
Open the “Codecs” menu in ffdshow.
Go to “Supported codecs” and check that Raw Video format is set to “all supported”

For those wanting to use WinDVD / Abstract / ffdshow in Zoom Player 2.8. You need to make a custom DVD filter graph. Search and you will find.
It is easier to use 3.1.

All video decoders will be in software mode when used in Zoom Player regardless of registry settings.
NvDVD has problems in software mode. With lower resolution and color banding problems.
The next version is supposed to fix this.

Maggie Guy,
If the picture is not filling the screen just use the zoom function in Zoom Player. You use the + or – key or you can setup the mouse wheel to zoom.
You may need to turn off “Restrict AR adjustments to height in zoom mode” in “Options / Aspect Ratio”


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Bulldogbreed, I've had the same problem, but I only see it when trying to play DVDs that I've converted from VHS tapes. Haven't seen it with prerecorded DVDs. The same converted DVDs play fine with WinDVD 4. Using Sonic decoders with ZP....haven't had any time to look into it further, unfortunately.

I seem to have a problem with aspect ratio control in ZP. I use a wireless keyboard and have no mouse in for my HTPC. When I press the minus key to the right of the zero, the image gets smaller as it should, but pressing the plus key does not do anything. So I am forced to hit the one to get back to a properly sized image.

I just figured it out. It's not the key next to the minus, it's the other plus key. It would make more sense to make it the key right next to the minus though.

Not really, Maggie Guy. The minus next to the zero is a minus, the plus next to that is actually an equal, you have to press shift to get to the plus sign, if you haven't noticed.

theatertek works with ffdshow, zp with sonic filters works now. it just magically started to connect with ffdshow instead of saying that it couldn't.

zp with windvd filters i get just a black screen, zp with powerdvd filters i get the scrambled green mess, zp with nvdvd filters get the scrambled green mess again. powerdvd, windvd, and nvdvd all work without ffdshow enabled in zp as well as with their whole program alone.

i guess i am stuck with zp, sonic, and ffdshow or theatertek for now. not a bad deal i guess, just like to be able to play around and tweak with combinations of filters and stuff :)

Bulldogbreed

If you want to try something to get windvd working with zp + ffdshow, do this.

Go to the registry area HKCU \ Software \ Intervideo \ Common \ Video
Make a DWord and call it DXVAPAL and set it to 1.

That is if you are using PAL. This gets rid of the black screen for me.

i am in the US so it would have to be ntsc, but i am connected to my tv using the svga in (its a proscan ps36800hr), so i dont' know if ntsc/pal matters or not. thanks for your idea though, i will try it just to see what happens

thanks anyway, i tried it and it didn't work. will continue reading to try to figure this out

Well, I figured out if you right click the ZP window when the DVD is playing, you can then click on "filter properties" and select the cyberlink decoder. On that dialog is a checkbox for hw acceleration. After I cleared that, I was able to use ffdshow without the green crap and weird multiple images.

Resize to 1440x960 + gradual denoise caused stutter. Moving the gradual denoise before the resize made it go away, but I couldn't really judge much improvement to PQ.

I changed resize to 1024x768 and moved denoise back to after resize and had no stutter. This made a noticeable improvement over the unfiltered image.

I like to use The Fifth Element, since it is an excellent transfer and I have seen it a million times. In scene 10, when Leeloo steps out onto the ledge, I used to notice a lot of noise on the wall, and on her thermal bandages when the cop spotlight is shining on her. This has now vanished, and I see a much smoother, more natural looking image.

Now, off to tweakville!

Gerald

So, my eyes are getting tired. 1152x960 is looking like the overall winner, with possibly occasional stuttering. May have to back it down some more. Does the amount of denoise affect the amount of CPU needed?

With an AMD 3200+ I am about 75-80%. Too bad ffdshow doesn't get along with hw acceleration.

Is there a way to take screenshots with ZP so I can compare ffdshow settings? And maybe some way to jump to a specific frame after making changes?

cgmoore,
Is there a way to take screenshots with ZP so I can compare ffdshow settings?
Use VMR9 render and PrintScreen key ;)...
-----

For consideration:

few days ago i compared quality of MPEG2 decoders such as: nvdvd 2.2/powerdvd5/windvd5.1.... so
1. PowerDVD looks little bit better, because Sharpen filter is enabled by default... it's like Unsharpen mask 20%,1,0 in Adobe Photoshop. And there is a lot of stuttering with this decoder.
2. WinDVD is really great. Image a little bit brighter then powerdvd/nvdvd... and it has low cpu usage!
3. NVDVD produces image like WinDVD but with some tiny color artifacts on the edges... you can see it only with zoom. Cpu usage is very high, but there is no stuttering at all!... and main advantage is no problem with ffdshow and with PAL DVDs... for now it is a best choice... of course if you have high speed CPU more then 1GHz+.

Mark Kennedy posted something about Pal... i will try it. i hope windvd is good as nvdvd.

I have now tried the Sonic video filters.

I found that these will run in ZP with ffdshow when hw acceleration is turned on. So I tried this in VMR mode for a few minutes when the screen froze and the sound went in to an infinite loop. I had to hit the reset button at this point.

I think it choked on VMR. I have had similar problems in some DirectX games lately.

It was movie night, so I simply fired up PowerDVD and went on.

Immediately I noticed microstuttering, so at the first chance I turned hw acceleration back on in the PowerDVD config and it went away. Eventually, towards the very end of the movie, I got a big stutter for about 1 second in video, with some associated audio synch issues.

You would think an AMD 3200+ on a nForce2 chipset could sneeze at decoding a DVD, but apparently not in my system. Something smells in Denmark, but I cant pinpoint it.

The system I "upgraded" from was smooth as butter.

Gerald

I just noticed when I went to turn off VMR in the cineplayer control panel applet, that hw accel was turned off. I could have swore I had turned it ON.

In case anyone is interested, Athos has a new unofficial build of FFDshow (20030927) up at: http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/ . I have yet to try this one myself...

I brought this point up a while ago, but I think it bears repeating, so:

The only valid comparison between the various DVD player software is:

Resolution, in other words, how much detail do you see in the image?

Color, gamma, white level, and black level are not valid comparison points, because all you are comparing is the default adjustment of the overlay controls that was chosen by the DVD player software manufacturer.

Vern Dias

Vern Dias,

Are you talking to me?....

There is no Overlay controls and other stuff when i capture image with player`s tool... in powerdvd/windvd/nvdvd you can capture same image and compare them in Adobe Photoshop...
use Different in layer option, then flatten image, and then AutoLevel... it will be difference :)

Try it!
Monkey`s tooth
http://madsly.nm.ru/img/compare-small.psd

Cpu Usage:
http://madsly.nm.ru/img/DVDCPU-load.png

There is no Overlay controls and other stuff when i capture image with player`s tool

Correct, and the image you capture is certainly not representative of what we watch on the screen in our HT.

Your description of the players makes no mention of using screen captures, and it also compares such qualities as brightness, cpu usage, and stuttering.

A still capture is also not a valid comparison because it omits many variables in processing moving MPEG2 images, such as deinterlacing, Macroblocking, and the like.

As to the timing of my post, Madsley

I was merely pointing out the fallacies of comparing certain parameters, mostly because of a rash of "A DVD player software is better than B DVD software" posting that were posted roughly a year or so ago that were based on parameters such as color saturation, gamma, brightness, etc. And the arguments, disagreements, and other ill will that was created between members.

Another major disconnect occurs when software is compared without taking note of other differences, HW decode, or SW decode mode is a major consideration. WinDVD 4 or later image quality, run in software decode mode yield much better image quality than when run in hardware mode.

Different player software also reacts differently to the use of VMR7, VMR9 and overlay as the renderer. You can have a considerable difference in the final image quality depending on which render you choose.

Then there is the tolerance of the player software to image processing addons such as FFDSHOW.

For example, the current NVDVD has real problems with aspect ratios when used with FFDSHOW.

Just some food for thought.

My methodolgy for comparing resolution two versions of a DVD or player software is simple: look at the copyright line of text or come other equally small lettering on the credits, determine the relative sharpness of the text (if you can read it at all) and compare the resolution of the different players based on what you see. This works with screen captures as well.

All other parameters are tunable in software.

Happy hunting.

Vern

Vern Dias,
For example, the current NVDVD has real problems with aspect ratios when used with FFDSHOW.
How can i see this kind of problem?

Different player software also reacts differently to the use of VMR7, VMR9 and overlay as the renderer
IMO only nvdvd player supports VMR :-\...
I wrote a comparison between nvdvd/powerdvd/windvd.... my first post is just a main quote.

Conditions: SW mode ON, all parameters by default, no additional filters, Force Weave mode.

ffdshow works well on NTSC dvds with every player, and on PAL only with NVDVD...
enabling DXVAPAL in windvd works not well - sometime picture freeze :(

I'd like to read your review and i'd like to know why NVDVD eats a lot of CPU while making some artifacts on the edges of contrast objects....


ps http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25412 - here i found some mistakes in players review.

Madsly,

This discussion is off topic for the ffdshow FAQ thread.

The merits or otherwise of NVDVD and other decoders has been thrashed out before in this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=262252&highlight=nvdvd+champ

All decoders are in software mode when used in Zoom Player with ffdshow, regardless of decoder registry settings.

NVDVD 2.55 has serious problems in software mode.

Here is an example of the color problems in software mode as posted by me.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?postid=2260283#post2260283

Here is an example of the resolution problems with NVDVD in software mode. Posted by Vern.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?postid=2262660#post2262660

It is rumored that the next version of NVDVD will fix these problems.

If you want to continue discussing this topic, I suggest you do so in the old NVDVD thread or start a new thread.

Thanks,



Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude



P.S. I have five machines (2 Notebooks and 3 Desktop Pc's including Athlon 1.8+, P4 2.2, Athlon 2.8+, P4 3.06, P4 3.3 CPU's and using both Radeon and Geforce video cards.) all running Zoom Player, ffdshow, WinDVD 4.5 and 5.0 playing PAL DVD's without any problems. So no one can tell me that Win DVD does not work well in Zoom Player or with PAL DVD's.

Can anyone give me some advise on the setup of descaler to work with ffdshow. I have downloaded and installed descaler and have found the way to access it in ffdshow. What file do I have to select for use in the blank window and perffered settings.

The newly released ffdshow pre beta 20030927 is a good one.
It now works with DVD’s without sound sync problems and contains some nice new filters that all seem to work as intended without problems so fare.

Good features include Denoise3d and SwScaler sharpen filter.

I find that default Denoise3d filter settings are to high.
I find that 2,2,5 before resize works well.

Maggie Guy,
The new Swscaler filter in the Sharpen menu is a good substitute for DsSharpen.
Give it a try.

If you want to use DsSharpen select “sharpen.dll” from the list.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

How's the CPU utilization for the new ffdshow?

Thanks Owen,
I will give it a try.

Originally posted by Goi
How's the CPU utilization for the new ffdshow?

It looks like it's better for my P4 based system than the last few.

I used to get stuttering with Lanczos resize for all builds after 20030103 on 30FPS material but I don't with this build but all is good so far.

This one looks like a keeper.

So no one can tell me that Win DVD does not work well in Zoom Player or with PAL DVD's.
I CAN because it is so....

"DXVAPAL"=dword:00000001

PAL DVD+ffdshow0523+windvdplatinum5.1:
Run PAL DVD- it works, then press Movie Fulscreen to Max, and then press it once again - you get Freeze image :(... rewind or change chapter can solve it.
with ffdshow-20030816.exe you get freeze image everytime.

With NTSC DVDs in same configuration and conditions i get BIG GREEN LINE at bottom, and if "DXVAPAL"=dword:00000000 this line is disappeared

What is wrong?... do i need to disable DXVA acceleration in WinDVD Tweaker?

ps Is it off topic for the ffdshow FAQ thread?....
pss Tomorrow i will try latest version of ffdshow

Madsly, if you havn't already done it, enable the WinDVD abstract filter in zoom player, that usually fixes the problem you are having.

When you do, make sure that abstracts settings are set to 0 (in WinDVD).

The green line may be related to that you haven't got "No aspect ratio correction" crossed in ffdshow's resize. :cool:

new denoise3d with 'HQ' checked is bomb. Cpu utilization is good....i'm happy

Hey guys, could you point me towards where this new version is located? I have been poking around and can't find anything other than the 2002/9/30 release on sourceforge.

Thanks,


Edit----

ACtually just found it through a thread on theatertek's forums.

Here (http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/)

Regards,

I just installed the ffdshow-20030927 and now none of the video decoders that had previously been working with ffdshow-20030523 (PowerDVD and Cineplayer) will connect.

To make matters worse, when I went back to ffdshow-20030523 they still won't connect.

This whole exercise has left a bitter taste in my mouth.

cgmoore,
Under "Codecs" in ffdshow.
Set "RAW video" to "All supported"

That should fix it.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Thanks, Owen. Now I remember doing that before!

DOH!

Gerald

CPU utilization is definitely improved for me with the 20030927 version. Went from about 85% to around 55% with same filters selected. I was able to jump up to 1440x960 without stuttering with my XP3200+ cpu.

I read somewhere else that when ffdshow is selected in zp, it will only use sw acceleration. This indeed seems to be true. There is a scene (21) in the movie Secretary where Spader walks across the lobby of his law office. When HW accel is enabled, this is very smooth, but without, it tears and looks horrible. I tried setting HW accel to ON with the PowerDVD decoder in ZP and the tearing did not go away until I took ffdshow out of the mix. This held true even when I ran ffdshow with no filters selected. So if ffdshow is selected in zp, it simply ignores whatever hw accel setting you may have chosen.

Are there any ffdshow filters (or anything else I can do) that will help this tearing?

Have you looked at the same scene with the WinDVD decoders? That could help, PowerDVD is low quality no matter what anybody says! As far as I know it hasn't won a real shootout on a higher end system yet. :cool:

Mark Kennedy,
Yep, i know this tweak... but i'd like to use windvd decoder without it...

Mastiff,
I don't use resize at all... and this green line is Huge!

denoise3d is an interesting filter and definitely helps image quality more so than regular gradual denoise, but boy does it consume CPU power! There's no way I'm able to run it after resize, I have to put it before...

Yep, i know this tweak... but i'd like to use windvd decoder without it...

WHAT ???????? :confused:

I am lost for words.

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

How does one enable the WinDVD abstract filter and what does it actually do?

Dont feel bad Goi,
I doubt that anyone can run denoise3d smoothly after any useful resize.
I can’t on my P4 3.3Gig Duel DDR system.
Come on Intel. Where is the 4Gig+ P5 ? :D

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

All credit to Milan Catka, the developer of ffdshow. You’re a legend.
And Athos for compiling and hosting the new build.
Great work guys.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Wonder if the Athlon 64s are going any better at these. Anyway, Prescotts will arrive shortly during xmas season, but probably not 4+GHz yet...

Goi,
The abstract filter, set to 0, does absolutely nothing to the picture.
It helps or eliminates the freezing problem with WinDVD.
Why anyone would not want to use it is a complete mystery.

It is enabled in Zoom Player in the Additional Filters section. Same as ffdshow.
It is called “DMO_V InterVideo Abstract”

You need to open the WinDVD player and set the filter to 0 so that it does not affect the picture.
Or you can edit the registry to do the same thing.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Sorry for sounding like an idiot, but I can't seem to find the filter in WinDVD setup, nor in ZP's Additional Filters...

What version of WinDVD are yue using?

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

I'm using WinDVD5.0 DXVA B26.007, ZP 3.10. Am I supposed to enable the filter with ffdshow? ZP doesn't have any "Additional Filters" menu in its setup dialog, only "Filter Control" and I don't see anything there either.

Goi,
Open Zoom Player Option
Go to “DVD”.
Select “DVD Setup” menu
Select “Customise (Recommended)”
You should now see options for Video Decoder, Audio decoder, Audio Renderer and Additional Filters.
You should tick the boxes for ffdshow and DMO_V InterVideo Abstract

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Ah, ok, now I see it. What does it actually do though?

The Abstract Filter just screw up my image with display of film-negative like image. I was however able to select the Negative or the Refine filter. Both of which eliminates the problem I have when selecting the Time Control.

What does these filter do anyway? When I unselect all of them except ffdshow with default InterVideo Video Decoder, I can play the video fine, but click on any of the time control bar, resulting in the image being frozen on the screen while the audio keeps playing.

Any explanation?

I am using ZP 3.1, WinDVD 5.1 and FFDSHOW 051303.

Regards
CJ

jojor, you have to set the abtract filter settings to "0" in WinDVD or by altering the registry before you use it. :).

When set to "0", this filter does not affect the image at all, but it does cure the freezing problem. I don't think anyone knows why....

Vern

Where in WinDVD do you set it to 0?

Goi,
------- run this ------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\DVD5]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\DVD5\Pasteurization]
"Scale"=dword:00000064
"Intensity"=dword:00000000
------

Owen,
My English is so bad or i wrote something wrong? :-\

Once again: i'd like to use WinDVD Video decoder for watching PAL DVDs with latest ffdshow filter without additional filters like Abstract... because of high cpu usage and stutering problem on my p3 866.
Is it clear?...
DXVAPAL can't solve this problem.

-----

Latest ffdshow has some problem when connecting to video render if Overlay mixer is enabled in ffdshow`s properties. :(

Using the new FFDShow last night proved interesting, there was less stuttering with video based stuff (menu's and the like) but it's still there a little bit. I am happy with the pic quality of it now which is good.

So I'd definitely suggest trying it out.

Madsly, I don't seem to have the subkey [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\DVD5\Pasteurizat
ion]
The subkeys in my DVD5 key are 5.0, 5.00.26, OEM, Registration and Weblink. There is not Pasteurization. Am I supposed to add it?

Madsly,
I am sorry to say that there is not much chance of you doing anything very useful with ffdshow on a PIII 866.
I don’t think the Abstract filter uses any noticeable CPU time when set to 0.
All the other DMO filters have a negative affect on picture quality according to Vern. Even when set to 0. ( Is that correct Vern?)
If you want to use WinDVD in Zoom Player you have no choice but to use the Abstract filter to cure the freeze problem. There is no other known way.
On such a slow system even the Abstract filter may not fix it.

You may have better luck using the Sonic decoder. It works well on slower systems.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Originally posted by Goi
How's the CPU utilization for the new ffdshow?

I just try 20030927 builds, and it have better performance in terms of CPU usage.
Before this I use 20030103 builds, ffdshow settings: Dscaler sharpen before resize (1280x720,Lanczos), with my stock P4 1.8A I got stutter so I must overclock it to at least 2.0G to get smooth playback.
But now with the same ffdshow settings and normal CPU speed (1.8G) I can get smooth playback.
Anyone considering upgrade/try ffdshow should try 20030927 builds.

PS: I haven't test it with video (30fps) material.

Hi,
is there any way to have different ffdshow settings depending on the type of movie played? I have seen the profiles option in ffdshow but can't seem to get it to work.
What I want is in Zoom Player, I'd like ffdshow to deinterlace raw video (dvd) but postprocess divx (all types) and xvid. I need this as post processing crashes dvds (I am using the WinDVD 5 filter) but makes everything else look oh so good.

Thanks for any help given
Morien

Owen,

Just want to let you know my findings,with the 20030927 builds we can change the resize method on the fly, just apply it and we already change the resize method.
I noticed this when I use Lancsoz and want to try Spline, when I change the resize method and apply it, immediately I got stutter.

Thanks Bubun. I noticed the same thing myself.
Spline is not usable at this time. Don't bother with it.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

With the new FFDSHOW update, I get a pin connection failure between ffdshow and the overlay mixer. I have double checked all my settings and they seem to be correct.

Setup -> zoomplayer 3.10 pro, ffdshow, windvd5 (latest build) audio and video, abstract filter.

works fine with the 0523 build but craps out with the 0927 build.

anyone else having this problem?

-J

pontiacgagt,

Why are you enabling overlay mixer in ffdshow?
It is not required. Zoom Player handles that.
What did you hop to achieve?

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Unchecked overlay mixer in ffdshow and it works fine now.

Thanks

-J

Anybody tried Denoise3D in the new version? I thought it look horribly unnaturally with over smooth facial feature and less detail.

What is your experience?
BTW, DVD Mode only works for Overlay and VMR Windowed, it doesn't work for VMR Windowless on ZP.

I tried resize to 1280x720 before applying the blurring and sharpening. What I get is a sharp picture with a streak of bright line underneath the image when viewing 2.35:1 material on a 16x9 screen in some bright scene. Is this normal?

I also get a flickering light when viewing 4x3 MPEG material. I tried to use custom filter for MPEG1 in ZP, but it doesn't work, ZP always defaulted to MPEG1 Video Decoder for MPEG1 movie. Yes, I did checked the Use Custom Decoder overwriting whatever in the Filter Management priority.


Regards
CJ

Hi Owen
I find that default Denoise3d filter settings are to high.

are you using this instead of the gradual denoise

steve

s.morris,

I find Denoise3d (before resize) good for DIVX or Xvid video, but I still prefer Gradual Denoise, after resize for DVD content.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

So far I've only tested denoise3d before resize for divx/xvid video, and I've found it to be great. Haven't tried it for DVD content so Owen could be right.

And about different options for DVD/Divx...
FFDshow options -> image settings - Enable "Automatic preset loading"
And add several presets... for example:
"DVD" - On movie dimentions match: 700-720 AND 480-576
"Divx" - 300-700 AND 200-480

denoise3d is superior to gradual denoise, even for dvds. The trick is to use reasonable settings. Personally, i use 0.70 for luma, 0.70 for chroma, and 4.00 for the time setting. At those settings you remove far more noise than with gradual, and don't lose any of the detail (at least any that i'm able to notice). I find that setting the time setting too high results in noticable motion artifacts.

The only problem with this is that for dvds it can seriously eat your cpu cycles. I had to switch from sinc to lanzcos for resize method.

I'm running a Celeron 2.0 w/512mb RAM and a Ti4200.

What type of resize should I expect. I run my desktop at 1360 x 768 and ffdshow/zoomplayer died at that resize setting, I dropped down to the next widescreen res (1280 x 720) and it choked and died there as well.

Expectations? Tips?

TIA fellas,

Brian

Yeah, one tip: CPUs are cheap these days. Get one that can get with the program. :cool:

Originally posted by Madsly


Once again: i'd like to use WinDVD Video decoder for watching PAL DVDs with latest ffdshow filter without additional filters like Abstract... because of high cpu usage and stutering problem on my p3 866.
Is it clear?...
. . .

Madsly

I'll try to find ( may take some weeks) an AMD 1700+ system (nice to o'clock) for you. (mobo+cpu+ ddr). Can you assemble it and is there a reasonable chance that the package will arrive at yr address? It is for free, but you probably have to pay the custom tax
Kyrill

Nice picture, by the way..

Originally posted by Goi
Madsly, I don't seem to have the subkey [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\InterVideo\DVD5\Pasteurizat
ion]
The subkeys in my DVD5 key are 5.0, 5.00.26, OEM, Registration and Weblink. There is not Pasteurization. Am I supposed to add it?

Goi...did you ever get an answer to this. Switching to Lancsoz appears to have allowed me to resize to 1280 x 720 on my 2.0 Celeron w/no freezing. But I do have the freeze problem that is fixed by the abstract filter...

[edit]

I did find the answer, a previous post said it was on page 6, it's now on page 7. I couldn't ever find a setting to adjust for the "abstract" filter, but it turns out that was because that setting is only "adjustable" while a movie is playing.

Regards,

Brian

kyrill,
I'll try to find (may take some weeks) an AMD 1700+ system (nice to o'clock) for you. (mobo+cpu+ddr).
Can you assemble it and is there a reasonable chance that the package will arrive at yr address?

I'm shocked.... Why are you doing it?... Charity or act of goodwill ?

There is no problem with package if adress is right. (NASA`s CDs and poster arrived without problem)

It is for free, but you probably have to pay the custom tax
How much does it cost?

I wish it was charity, meaning I would have a lot ($) to share : )

On the other hand from one video lover to another, that is how I see this forum, if it is possible, why not?

Can you send me a private message?
K.

Three chears for kyrill.
That’s what I call helping your fellow video lover.
Great stuff.

It’s your lucky day Madsly. The AMD 1700+ should work well enough.
You will still need that abstract DMO filter for WinDVD. :D

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Question on using FFDSHOW in a slightly different way. Adventures of Robin Hood finally out on DVD but, while the colors are absolutely stunning, the grain really shows on the film. The Laserdisc as analogue blends that a little better. Is there a setting or couple of settings to even out the grain.?

I know this is the opposite of how I usually use the filters, but was hoping some folks have some experience/comments.

Tim

rudolpht
to give you a "true" (always subjective, isn't it?) answer, I must have that dvd as well as well as your setup, which I don't.
So your best wisdom is your own wisdom in trying out the different filters in ffdshow. I would try gradual denoise with different numbers before or after the resizing and use only the sharpen filters (maybe to a lesser extend) of resizing

Finding the right settings, isn't that half of the fun?

This seems to be my experience thusly w/my (measly) Celeron 2.0...

I can run ffdshow resizing to 1280 x 720, but when I run the abstract filter (to correct the lockup problem) that seems to add that little extra umph that 'causes it to hit the ceiling and I get stuttering. Any idea how much extra overhead abstract adds?

Brian

I have a question regarding ffdshow settings for supported output colourspaces.

I have been trying setting YUY2 as the only supported output and it works. WinDVD already outputs YUY2 to ffdshow and now ffdshow outputs YUY2. Things are much slower with this though and I can't notice much difference. Is there one? I am testing a new version of ReClock for Ogo and he has fixed the bugs that made DVDs freeze but he also added an information label that shows what colourspace is being sent to ReClock. With YV12 (what ffdshow defaults to if I say all are supported), it sayw YV12 12 bit and with YUY2 it ways YUY2 16bit. This new version should be released very soon. It works great!!

Does anyone know if it is an advantage to use YUY2 or do the colours have to be comverted to YV12 anyways before being converted to RGB32.

Thanks,

It will be great if authors of "ZP/Reclock/Ffdshow/ac3filter/and some other filter/stuff (DVD players A/V codecs)" make "Stable DVD/Divx video pack"....

...like gordian knot. "AngelPotion " or nimo codec pack...

is it real?...

Whenever I use FFDshow resize with TheaterTek my green-colors are thrown way down. It goes down to -25 on the avia color decoder check.

does anyone know a way to fix this? has it been resolved in any current versions?

playing with no expectations i found a new filter combination that in my case (JVC d-ila projector 1360x1024) but also on my 21 inch crt Hitachi monitor got a sharper image with no offending side effects, Better than dscaler sharpening before or after resizing and using gradual denoise (before or after resizing) with resizing 1280x960 and both chroma and luma sharpening to 1.8

I got now
before resizing in this sequence:
1) picture properties, gamma correction 1.45
2a) resize and aspect settings
1280x 960
2b) settings, luma and chroma 1.00
after resizing
3)Sharpen, asharp default

with an AMD 2800xp cpu load of average 85%*

These settings work for new dvd's with very little or no grain.
I have to find out (still) how this works with more grainier dvd's
* without using DMO_V Intervideo Abstract

The abstact filter uses appr. 10% xtra cpu cycles.
You do not need this filter if you avoid the menu and just play the movie straight on and don't change anything during the movie except stop (pause) and play
This is possible with re-authored dvd backups on hdd or you "de-install" the abstract filter when the movie has just begun. ZP will remember when you start again, where you were.

Kyrill, what size screen does your d-ila project to in this evaluation?

--Bill

bblue
diagonal 140"

I have (to my surprise some cpu cycles left, so I can still try add a filter for a new cocktail) : )

FFDSHOW 20030927 builds is fantastic. FASTER than ever, it permits to try other filter combination.

I now use this sequence of filter on my ATHLON XP 1800:
GRADUAL DENOISE 30
RESIZE 848x720 LANCZOS
LUMA 2
CHROMA 1.8
SHARPEN SW
LUMA 1.8
CHROMA 0
And have a very natural & sharpen image on both 1600x1200 on my CRT monitor, and 800x600 EPSON EMP500 Videoprojector.

I am now convinced to change to a SHARP XVZ10000 and 3Ghz/800mhz mb.
I am still using TheaterTek for its very helpfull Home-cinema functions like colors calibration and aspect ration corection for each DVD.

BUT...

I have notice that the use of SW sharpen change the global color of the image slightly to green. It affect the image also if the color sharpen is set to 0.
I am wondering if there is a way to revert back the color?
Mark Kennedy, before in the thread, have start a very interesting way of research with the different colorspaces output.

Did someone have solve the problem of this color change with SW sharpen?

Mars1

FFDSHOW 20030927 builds is fantastic

Where do you get this version from?

Spearmint

early in this thread, there is a link

:)

I did a search for you, That is why the "search"mode is for : )
http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/

Have read this entire thread with great interest & saw a few references to de-interlacing using dscaler & resize/etc. using ffdshow, but not sure I saw an answer (at least one that I understood!). Could someone please explain (in noobish) what the relationship between deinterlacing (dscaler?)and the scaling/image processing (ffdshow?) is. Do peeps still use dscaler (apart from the dscaler sharpening affect applied within ffdshow) to deinterlace separately from ffdshow. Before, after, during? Does ffdshow replace or substitute for dscaler? Do you then use powerstrip to scale (if necessary) to the native resolution of your display for output by vid-card. Thanks!

Bill

Thankyou Mars1 & kyrill

Appreciate the help

Mars1,
Try using Descaler Sharpen in stead of SW Sharpen. It give much the same result without color shift.

Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

billeR,
Descaler was designed as a real time deinterlacer and filter for watching video from a TV card. It dose not handle video from software DVD players of video from hard disk.
However most descaler filters can be used inside ffdshow for DVD/Video playback. Most of the filters have better alternatives inside ffdshow. The only useful one is the Sharpen filter IMHO.

Powerstrip is generally not required unless your display device needs custom resolutions or refresh rates that are not provided in the video card drivers.


Regards,

Owen
____________________________
The ffdshow resize – sharpen dude

Hi Guys,

I have read the thread but still have some questions -- I am trying to use ZP 3.20 + windvd 5.1 + ffdshow but experience various crashes/hangs/stutters. All my DVDs are PAL.

* It is recommended to use the WinDVD Abstract filter to improve stability -- does this have anything to do with PAL?

* Does the DXVAPAL registry change address all the PAL related crashes?

* Without ffdshow my XP2400 (265FSB) runs about 33% when playing a DVD, does that sound normal? Should there be enough grunt left to do a resize to 1360x768 (display resolution) and maybe a filter or two?

* What is "overlay" and "VMR9"?

Thanks for any advice!

Niall

Do any of you experts know what is the "ffvfw" file on athos ftp and what it does.


thanks

abshar

ffvfw is an MPEG encoding package used for video capture.

Thanks a lot for the info.


abshar

Anyone using an Optoma 17SF or similar type DLP projector?

I am curious to your performance and PQ results, and configuration if you could post them.

Thanks.

Will the ffdshow resize/sharpen/denoise software filters help PQ in my setup for DVD playback? Or does the faroudja chip and Dnie hardware perform a similar task? I have a Samsung DLP monitor with this hardware built in.

Here's my DVD playback setup:

P4 2.66Ghz 1GB DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro
DVI output to Samsung HLN617
WINDVD w/ZP front end

It will not take you to long to find out.
You already have WinDVD running in Zoom Player.
Just install ffdshow and select it as a filter in the same menu where you set up the WinDVD decoders. You also need to play a DVD in the normal WinDVD player so you can open the filters control panel and set the "abstract filter" to zero. Then you can select the "Abstract" filter in Zoom Player along with ffdshow. This stops the lockup problems often experienced.
You must also enable "All supported" for "RAW video" in the codecs page of ffdshow.

Happy testing.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Has anyone tried the 20031028 version of ffdshow that is posted on the http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/ site.

Yep, I tried it. No discernable difference compared to the 20030927 build for my standard settings.

I'm running Cat 3.8 drivers in case that matters.

Originally posted by razo125
Will the ffdshow resize/sharpen/denoise software filters help PQ in my setup for DVD playback? Or does the faroudja chip and Dnie hardware perform a similar task? I have a Samsung DLP monitor with this hardware built in.

Here's my DVD playback setup:

P4 2.66Ghz 1GB DDR
Radeon 9800 Pro
DVI output to Samsung HLN617
WINDVD w/ZP front end

I don't believe Dnie is used via DVI. I have the same TV connected via DVI with a 9600.

Hello all, new FFDShow user jumping into the fray.

I have done my best to scan through this thread but as it covers many versions and permutations I am now quite confused.

I have been experiencing an error that I cannot seem to find a solution for so I thought I should bring it up in this thread. I hope someone can help me out with it as I love using FFDShow.

Heres a rundown of what equipment and versions I have running

HTPC
Intel P4 2.8ghz - Hyperthreading on
1Gig Matched Dual Channel
Radeon 9600se
XP Pro

PC monitor
Viewsonic 17"

Projector
Optoma 17SF/H55 DLP

Zoomplayer 3.2
FFDShow 0523 build

---------------------------------------

When I use ZP and FFDShow from my HTPC to my Viewsonic it works great, no problems whatsoever. But when I switch to using DVI to my Optoma ZP gives me an error for FFDShow that says
Pins did not accept connection .

I have read and searched through the FAQ and the only reference to this error was to make sure the RAW VIDEO codec was selected.

I checked FFDShow and determined that Raw Video is set to ALL SUPPORTED .
I get this "pins" error even if I have .no filtering active in FFDShow, which seems strange.

I am somewhat stuck at this point so am hoping someone has some ideas I can try to get things working.

Thanks for any help and tips :)

I also have the same problem; Everything was working fine with PowerDVD video/audio filter; suddenly next day I got dot Pin did not accept connection error.

With WinDVD filter with Abstract & ReClock, this error did not come but I still get Stutter;

I am frustrated using ZP now!!!

I have been using Cyberlink PowerDVD audio/video Decoders.

I will have to load WinDVD and try those out.

I have a question about what resolution to use on my RPTV. Right now I use 856X480 at 540p timings. This gives me equivalent to an 856x480 display. The question I have is with an anamorphic DVD at 2.35:1 aspect ratio gives me about 364 pixels high (black bars top and bottom. Since the DVD res is 720 x 480, I am looing quality. Should I be running an interlaced res of say 1776 x 1000i at 1080i timings or even 1440x960i at 1080i timings.

There's not much you can do about losing resolution for widescreen movies. Anamorphic disks get you as much vertical resolution as is possible.

What you CAN do, and in fact should do, is run your display at a higher resolution such as 1920x1080i. When you do this you have effectively turned your HTPC into a line doubler/scaler.

ffdshow also plays a part in this since when you resize your are doing the same thing, line doubling/scaling, but you are doing it to the raw DVD image before it gets sent to your video card.

If you are using an ATI card 1920x1080i is a better resolution for DVDs since the scaling algorithm works better for DVD resolutions. There is a DVD scaling thread that has lots of info on the good and bad of scaling.

What version of ATI drivers should I be using. I have Radeon 7000. I have heard of interlating problems with certain versions of the driver. Right now I am using the latest 3.9

Interlaced resolutions via VGA or DVI do not work with any driver later than the 3.4 release.

So they went backwards? Now interlaced resolutions work with Nvidia and not with ATI.

double post.

Zewt,

I just can’t understand how Zoom Player – ffdshow can be affected by what connection your video card is using for output. They are just not related in any way.
If it works on your PC monitor, it MUST work on ANY other output.

It may be worth uninstalling and reinstalling ffdshow and resetting all settings.


Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

I've been reading the FAQ and Im still confused on the whole resizing thing.

I run 856x480p for my desktop but I play my DVD's in 1776x1000i, so what are my resizing options for ffdshow? Im running a P4 2.53 with 768 RAM and a 64GB Radeon 8500.

Thanks in advance.

denger,

How can your DVD playback be at 1776x1000i on a 856x480 desktop?
Are you using two displays at different resolutions? Or do you change resolution to play DVD’s ?

You can try two popular options for ffdshow resize.
Double DVD resolution 1440x960 for NTSC.
Or your DVD playback resolution of 1776x1000.
Give them both a try and see which you prefer.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Thanks for the reply Owen, I will try that but I have now had this same problem on two of my systems.

first is a Win2K using a GEforce DVI out.

Second is a XPpro using Radeon 9600se, DVI out also.

I will run some more tests, and I am going to try my DVI to VGA adaptor cable.

Has anyone been able to get ffdshow to work with PowerDVD5? I had it working with 4 but 4 was too sharp to begin with. 5 is more soft and could possibly use some sharpening but I am not sure.

Brian

Owen, yes I change my resolution to play DVD's. Sorry I didnt state that before.

Wow, what a thread. Alot to take in, but thanks in advance to all who have posted because it is a great repository of information.

I am in the midst of planning my HT. I will be buying an Infocus 7200 (1280x720 DLP) and want to have my HTPC ready to go when the projector is installed. I want to build an HTPC that will be usable for as long as possible, so I'm going with a fast processor. Here is where I am:

P4 3.06 GHz 512k (Hyper-Threading)
2x256MB DDR PC2100 SDRAM
Radeon 9200 128MB w/ DVI

I really have two questions. First, will the hyper-threading be a problem? I have heard that it doesn't work with some of the HTPC apps.

Second, I am not a gamer, so I assume that the Radeon 9200 is good enough. Is that a safe assumption?

I will likely run TheaterTek/ffdshow. Don't see any need for dScaler and/or Powerstrip.

Please feel free to point me in a different direction on my hardware choices.

Thanks,
Phil

I have a new HTPC that I am (obviously) working on tweaking.

I am running an Intel P4 2.8ghz with dual channel and hyperthreading with no troubles yet. At least none that I can attribute to hyperthreading.

On WinXPpro, dont think hyperthreading works on anything else essentially, then XP.

Just to check, under the re-size setting, there is a check box for 'Interlaced'. When should we check it for interlaced and when should we uncheck it for progressive?

Thanks in advance!

While I'm not 100% sure what that box does from a S/W point of view I can tell you that for DVD playback you want to have it in "grey" mode. The box has three setting, unchecked, checked, and "grey".

I playback DVDs at 1080i and if I have interlaced "checked" it does weird and nasty things. If you own AVIA, check out the resolution patterns and you'll see what I mean. When the box is "greyed" everything looks fine. I can't remember what it does when it's unchecked.

Also, the help box for the resize page says that you should used "greyed" for MPEG-2 playback.

Hey Owen and Kyrill, THANKS!!! Your knowledge and generosity to share your knowledge is very appreciated. It took me 7 hrs non-stop to completely read the 22-page subject, and now I'm very educated on how to setup my HTPC to play DVD on my newly acquired Sony RPTV. I will certainly try them out tonight. :)

***TO ALL THE NEWBIES OUT THERE READING THIS THREAD.......READ THE "WHOLE" POST BEFORE ASKING YOUR IGNORANT QUESTIONS!!!*** There were questions that were repeated 10 or more times, Owen and Kyrill are kindly enough to share their testing and research data with us, it is only fair that you guys actually do some reading and research yourselves. (If I were you, Owen, I would have driven to some of these poster's house and bitch-slapped them, lol) =P

Back to the subject, has anyone try out the new 20031028 ffdShow?


Thx again guys. ;)

I'm sorry, but it's tough to ask someone to read a whole 23 page thread. If they search and don't find anything, I don't mind someone asking a question again.

I've been running the 20031028 release for a couple of weeks now.

No noticeable difference compared to the previous release as far as I can see.

Originally posted by Vaggeto
I'm sorry, but it's tough to ask someone to read a whole 23 page thread. If they search and don't find anything, I don't mind someone asking a question again.


Thats OK Vaggeto, you can answer the questions from now on. :D

I generally don’t mind answering questions, but it does get aggravating when it appears the person asking has made no effort to do any research.
Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Hello,

Today, what is the best version of ffdshow alpha? December 2002 or another one?

Thanks

Which is why this should be made into a real FAQ, either a sticky post here in the forum or an external website FAQ.

Originally posted by DTSman-fr
Hello,

Today, what is the best version of ffdshow alpha? December 2002 or another one?

Thanks

20030927 is probably the most used since it fixed a performance issue that existed in 20030523.

I am using 20031028 with no discernable difference from 20030927.

Thanks jvincent.

Because, I have heard ffdshow from december 2002 was faster with bicubic mode in resize & sharpen...

I just downloaded the 20031028 build of Ffdshow, and it's the first one I have been completely happy with. First of all, TomsMoComp deinterlacing works great, on the other builds I have tested, I have gotten diagonal green bars.

I have been a great fan of the resize/sharp thing for a while, but have never gotten it to work stabile before now.

I read further back in the thread that Spline was the best resize method, and after testing, I totally agree, the only problem was that my XP 2400 system wasn't fast enough to give smooth playback when resizing to XGA (my desktop rez).

I tried other methods of resizing, but Spline is so much better than the others, that I decided that it was Spline or nothing. My solution became to resize to 800X600, it's not much of a resize, but using the sharpen options in the settings under resize & aspect, still improves my picture a lot. I can not see any drawbacks with this method, I've tested with film encoded without EE, and it looks very good.

Have anybody else tried this approach?

Btw. I use no other settings in Ffdshow, TomsMoComp is only used for videobased sources.

Frode

yeah thats all I could resize up to with my 2000+ athlon, 800x600. Even with that low resolution resized to I get better PQ than with the old unsharpen mask method only.

Blur&NR - soften 30, gradual denoise 30
resize - 800x600, bicubic, luma 2.00 and chroma 2.00
sharpen - unsharp mask 20


all in that order the CPU is at 100%. so far so good.

Here's a VERY newbish set of questions .Sorry, I just don;t have time to read every post in this thread and "search" did not yield the answers I was looking for.

I am very much into tweaking my display. It is just a tube HDTV (Sony 36XBR800) but I love it anyhow. I do not use my HTPC for DVD playback do use it for playback of various MPEG-2, divx, and xvid movies a lot with a version of WMP. I have been playing around with ffdshow but I am not sure about the whole resizing and how that all will work. A good amount of the files I play are "widescreen". I tried playing around with the resize option in ffdshow a little bit and set it to 1280x960 and set my desktop to 1280x960i in powerstrip (I am using a transcoder from the infamous DIY transcoder thread). When I play a media file in WMP at this resolution I get basically the top half of the video and nothing more. I have player around with these settings a lot and even if I take resizing out of the picture, I get the same top hlaf of the video and nothing more. Is this an issue with interlaced resolutions and WMP, or maybe my card, or maybe so goof-up in general in my part?

P4 2.4Ghz, Radeon 9600, 1GB PC2700....

anyone?

Windows Media player has no aspect ratio control, therefore, not too many people in this forum actually use it. I don't doubt that media player is screwing something up after the resize, I just doubt there's much you can do about it.

Look into zoomplayer

Anyone notice that combining low-levels of both denoise3d and gradualdenoise can really get rid of a tremendous amount of noise without hurting details?

Alone, neither is effective enough. If you raise the settings too high, you get motion artifacts wiith both denoise3d and gradual. However, because they are different techniques, it seems you can use a combination of both of them near the threshold for artifacts and end up with much more noise killing than you would have with either alone.

Try these settings for dvd material (this is what I'm currently using)

gradual denoise :20
denoise3d luma:0.65 chroma:0.65 time:3.40

With these settings, I cannot notice any motion artifacts or loss of detail (and this on a 65" screen), however it allows me to completely remove the misquito noise from my dvds.

I though ZP would be my only option. Now if only it could be integrated into myHTPC well.....

Question: where do I get these extra features everyone is commenting on for ffdshow. I have read something about dscaler being used in ffdshow and now these noise filters. There is no mention of these specific items in the config. Are these add-ons? If so, where do I get them and how do I go about installing them? Is it just a matter of registering them? Thanks and sorry for the questiosn..it's jsut my nature.

hynek, do you use unsharp mask instead of dScaler sharpen for some particular reason? :cool:

Originally posted by llamameat


Try these settings for dvd material (this is what I'm currently using)

gradual denoise :20
denoise3d luma:0.65 chroma:0.65 time:3.40

With these settings, I cannot notice any motion artifacts or loss of detail (and this on a 65" screen), however it allows me to completely remove the misquito noise from my dvds. [/B]

THE BEST settings I've seen yet. Thanks I'm rediscovering all my DVDs now.

Originally posted by llamameat

Try these settings for dvd material (this is what I'm currently using)

gradual denoise :20
denoise3d luma:0.65 chroma:0.65 time:3.40


llamameat,

What other ffdshow settings are you using? Resize (which algorithm)? Unsharp mask?

Also, what CPU are you using?

I'm running a 2.5G P4 and if I turn on denoise3d I start stuttering like crazy. I resize to 1440x960 (lanczos) in addition to gradual denoise and I was wondering if I need an excuse for a CPU upgrage. :)

Originally posted by jvincent
llamameat,

What other ffdshow settings are you using? Resize (which algorithm)? Unsharp mask?

Also, what CPU are you using?

llamameat,
On top of that, if it is not too much trouble, can you please post your order of selected options and configuration in ffdShow?

Thx!! :D

Ok, I have Blur and NR checked first (it's gonna kill your cpu otherwise). In there I have gradual and denoise3d set to the settings I specified before. I leave 'process whole image' unchecked here because there's no reason to denoise black bars (waste of cpu).

Next is resize. I resize to 1440x960 using lanczos (and output to my tv at 1440x960i) and with 'interlaced' checked (since it's for dvds). Keep 'process whole image' checked here, you don't want ffdshow to crop the black bars and resize only the used area because then scaling would be off.

You really want to use newest version of ffdshow found here http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/. In the older versions I could definitely tell that 'spline' was better than lanczos, but with the new version lanczos seems every bit as good (without using as much cpu).

For sharpening I set chroma and luma resize sharpening to 1.60. This may seem excessive, but on my tv I set it's native (i.e crappy) sharpening completely turned off. Also I disabled velocity scan modulation, so my set doesn't sharpen AT ALL.

However you'll generally want to resize to your displays native resolution. If you have a plasma that's only capable of 856x480 (or fill in blank) then that's what you should resize to. If you don't it's gonna scale it down to that size anyway, and it won't be using a method as good as lanczos. Also you'll wanna output at that resolution from your pc! Now as I said I use 1440x960i, which is not the native max resolution of my HDTV, but I use DVI and 1920x1080i didn't fit well at all and 1440x960 did and happens to be a perfect resolution for scaling dvds.

One more tip. I use resize sharpening, but this method is not as good if you are resizing to smaller dimensions, in this case you may want to stick with descaler's sharpening method with is also pretty darn good.

Anyway, this is what I use. Keep in mind I have a crazy fast CPU. It's a 3.2 with hyperthreading enabled. It's cool though, even with this all enabled my cpu usage is only 35-40% for dvds!

Hmm, looks like my 2.5G is going to be the bottleneck since I'm doing the same stuff in the same order as you are, minus the denoise3d.

Looks like I should add a new CPU to the XMAS list.

jvincent: Did you check the "HQ" box for denoise3d? Oddly enough, that seems to ease up the CPU. I'm getting smooth playback on a P4 2.4 without hyperthreading. I'd have to say it looks better than Dscaler Sharpness=60, Resize as below, and Blur/NR w/just Gradual denoise=40.

Settings:
Codecs are disabled except for Raw Video=all supported and only YUY2 is checked.
Blur/NR set to llamameat's settings
Resize is @ 960x540 (projector's native rez), Lanczos, Parameter=9.00, Luma and Chroma set to llamameat's settings

I tried it with HQ both checked and unchecked.

I'm resizing to 1440x960 using lanczos, which is where most of my CPU is going.

can somone possible point me to a faq that gives details on how to add these filters you guys are discussing and how all that works? Thanks a bunch!

Hi,

I'm trying to use ffdshow with Dscaler filter (from Dscaler 4.1.7). But it has NO effect whatsoever. I'm using the latest 20031028 version.

Long long time ago (maybe over a year ago), ffdshow did work with Dscaler filters.

Anyone know what is the last ffdshow version that works with Dscaler filter? Thanks in advance.

regards,

Li On

jvincent: Is 1440x960 the resolution you're outputting to your monitor/TV/projector, or is it just what you're resizing to in ffdshow? You may want to aim for your display's native rez.

1440x960 is what I'm resizing to.

I have a CRT RPTV that I drive with 1920x1080i to bypass its internal scalers. I don't have enough CPU juice to resize all the way to that res.

Hmm. See if resizing lower smooths it out. I'd try 1280x720 or even 960x540 (rough progressive equivalent of 1080i). Also, set the "Interlaced resolution" checkbox to grayed out.

Thanks for the suggestions but I'm happy with my resizing right now after many moons of tweaking. :) I was just messing around to see if denoise3d added anything.

1440x960 is actually optimum for resizing. It's perfect 2x scaling in both X and Y for DVDs.

I use TT as my DVD player with an 1800x960 AR which means that my 1440x960 resized image is displayed in an 1800x960 pixel "window" within a 1920x1080 frame. Again, 1800x960 is also perfect scaling for DVDs so I don't get any aliasing artifacts when the 1440x960 image is mapped to 1800x960.

TT then sends the full 1920x1080 frame to the video card for final output.

Thanks llamameat. I tried the Denoise settings you suggested but I find that denose3d set to Luma 4.00, Chroma 3.00 Time 4.00 without Gradual denoise works best for me.


My ffdshow settings are, in order:

Levels (Full Range ON, Input 16, 255 Output 0,255 Gamma 1.00)

Descaler Filter (Sharpen.dll 135)

Blur & NR (denoise3d. Luma 4.00, Chroma 3.00, Time 4.00, HQ)

Resize & Aspect (1440x1152 PAL) Sharpen (Spline, Luma 1.00, Croma 1.00)

Combined with VMR9 using 2x Anti-Aliasing and 2x Anisotropic Filtering gives me the most natural, smooth, realistic and noise free image I have so fare experienced.
The harsh digital look is almost completely gone.

This setup works great for DIVX and Xvid video as well.
I disable Descaler sharpen for poor quality Mpeg4 material.


Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Originally posted by jvincent
Thanks for the suggestions but I'm happy with my resizing right now after many moons of tweaking. :) I was just messing around to see if denoise3d added anything.

1440x960 is actually optimum for resizing. It's perfect 2x scaling in both X and Y for DVDs.

I use TT as my DVD player with an 1800x960 AR which means that my 1440x960 resized image is displayed in an 1800x960 pixel "window" within a 1920x1080 frame. Again, 1800x960 is also perfect scaling for DVDs so I don't get any aliasing artifacts when the 1440x960 image is mapped to 1800x960.

TT then sends the full 1920x1080 frame to the video card for final output.

See - I just don't "get it". I don't understand the point of using Ffdshow to scale the DVD image to 1440x960, if your running at a 1920x1080i resolution. Your video card is still performing scaling and thus, throwing any possible benifit out the window.

Unless you can use Ffdshow to scale directly to the resolution you're running your display at (1920x1080i for example), I don't see how there is any increase in IQ - at least I didn't get any by doing it.
I too fall in your situation - I don't have enough CPU horsepower to scale directly to 1920x1080i. So I tried 1440x960 in Ffdshow, and allowing my video card to display it at 1920x1080i. As hard as I looked, I saw no improvement in IQ at all...

And, like you, I was using TT's AR editor to adjust the image a bit. Does anyone know what method TT uses to scale? Does it simply use the video card's overlay to scale?

So now, I simply use a nice 1920x1080i resolution (with accurate geometric proportions) so I don't have to use TT's AR editor (except for letterbox and 4x3 movies) - and I skip using Ffdshow as well. I'm only scaling once (with my video card) and I think the image looks fantastic.
Using Ffdshow + TT's AR editor + video card scaling seems like a total waste as though you'd be going through a few "generations" of quality IMHO.
Anyway...that's just my experience with this whole Ffdshow craze...


EDIT


One more thing -
You said that you use TT's AR editor to scale the DVD frame to 1800x960. Keep in mind that this isn't a 16x9 aspect ratio (it would have to be 1800x1013) - so you're probably introducing some geometric distortion in the process of re-scaling your image.

-Ryan Dinan

Hey Ryan,

Good points. If all I was doing was scaling I would probably do the same thing as you are. However, I find that the default image is too soft so I use ffdshow for sharpening.

I've messed around with the various sharpening methods and I find that I like the resize one the best. For now at least. :)

Originally posted by Owen
My ffdshow settings are, in order:

Descaler Filter (Sharpen.dll 135)

Blur & NR (denoise3d. Luma 4.00, Chroma 3.00, Time 4.00)

Resize & Aspect (1440x1152 PAL) Sharpen (Spline, Luma 1.00, Croma 1.00)


Gulp... What kind of machine have you got to be able to do all these things? My machine is almost choking on the denoise3d/bluring alone.. Spline makes for 92% CPU usage..

My HTPC is:
Pentium 4 2,66 GHz, with 533MHz FSB.

Regards,
Tore K.

Hi,

I'm IN! Thanks! :)

regards,

Li On

Mercer,

In answer to your question.

Hardware:

P4 2.8C at 3.5Gig on 1Gig FSB.
Asus P4P800 Deluxe main board.
1 Gig Dual Channel Corsair PC4000 DDR at 250Mhz
Radeon 9600 Pro Overclocked (486Mhz Core, 742Mhz Memmory)

Software:
WinXP Pro SP1
WinDVD5 video decoder
AC3Filter 0.7b Audio decoder or WinDVD5 Audio decoder
Zoom Player 3.2 (Using VMR9)
Ffdshow Alpha 27 Sep 2003
Reclock 1.2
Omega Radeon drivers V2.4.96b


This machine runs without any stutter with the filters I am using, but is close to maxed.
It is used as a HTPC only. I don’t play games.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Owen: How did you get VMR9 to work with the WinDVD video decoder? I thought it was still impossible.

OK, I just installed ffdshow last night for use with TheaterTek and in a word, "WOW!" I've only tested it with Monsters Inc, but man, what a difference! I can actually SEE the textures of the various monsters' skin.

The texture of the headband on the octopus sushi chef at the "Harryhausen" restaurant now actually looks like a bandage-like cloth whereas without ffdshow, it was just white.

Now, if we could only somehow condense the 24-pages of this thread into a comprehensive "CLIFFS NOTES" version, that would be great.

I am loathing the thought of having to peruse all 24 pages of this thread for hints & tips for optimum DVD enhancement. :confused:

JBlacklow,

Zoom Player will use whatever output renderer you choose.
It does not matter what video decoder is in use.

I had to spend quite some time fiddling with the VSinc slider in Reclock to get VMR9 to work without tearing.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

hmmm...for those with difficulties outputing at full 1920x1080i (if that's your display's native resolution).....try resizing to 960x1080 or 1920x540, resizing for hardware then is really simple because it just needs to line double the verticle or horizontal (most resize methods will not screw that up). The problem is that resize sharpen might not look as good with less resolution to work with....maybe try descaler sharpen?

Just for fun I once tried for PERFECT dvd scaling by doing the following.....I outputted at 1920x1080i (native res of tv) but forced zoomplayer to only utilize 1800x960 lines of resolution (this works with some setups because DVI output is way overscanned anyway)....used ffdshow...resized to 1800x960 with sinc......

I modified my tv's service menu to get the resulting image to fit perfectly on my tv......and I have to say...perfect scaling is pretty cool....but i sacrified a little because it was too much hassle to output at that resolution :)

I'm doing pretty much what llamameat describes in TT, as described a few posts up, with the AR editor in TT with the exception that I'm resizing to 1440x960 instead of 1800x960. This is still good scaling since everything is still nice multiples of the DVD native res.

Ryan,

As it turns out the combination of 1920x1080i resolution to the TV and 1800x960 TT window fits my TV nearly perfectly without introducing any geometric distortions because the difference in my X and Y overscan at 1920x1080i to the TV was almost exactly the inverse of the distortion caused by running at 1800x960.

Like many others here, I've probably spent way too much time in service mode on the TV getting this right.

I tried ffdshow a couple months back with TT. Back then I found it a bit cumbersome (setting AR, etc.) and uninstalled it again. Now I have heard that ffdshow has even improved more. I would like to give it a shot again, but after reading to some of the 25 pages I am still not clear how to get started… Apparently the UI (and probably a lot more) has changed quite a bit. I also checked over at the TT forum: Wayne’s set-up guide seems to be no longer valid for the latest versions of ffdshow, which seems to be the preferred one.
After installing the latest version (20031028) I tried to activate it from within TT – no luck. TT crashes every time with this error message:

AppName: theatertek dvd. Exe
AppVers: 1.5.0.56
ModName: ffshow.ax
ModVer: 0.0.0.0
Offset: 001d240

I would truly appreciate any help on how to set up the ffdshow with TT and some setting recommendations for my system: P4 1.6GHz (OC-able to 2.1GHz if needed), 512MB, XP Pro SP1 with all patches, TT 1.5.56, M-Audio 410, ATI 9700Pro CAT3.9; display is 720p (Marantz S2 via DVI)

Thanks!
______
Axel

Axel,

Try the following. Disclaimer as follows, I'm typing this from memory since the HTPC is busy right now (kids) so I might make some mistakes.

After installing ffdshow, but before launching TT, you need to do the following.

Under the ffdshow tab of the windows Start menu go to the "Configure Raw only". This will open up a ffdshow configuration window.

Go to the codecs tab and make sure that Raw video shows all supported. In the supported colourspaces section select both YV12 and YUY2.

Since you're just starting I would suggest enabling the following two filters. Under Blur and NR, select Gradual Denoise with a strength of 20.

Under sharpen, select Unsharp mask with a strength of 25. Make sure process whole image is selected.

You should now be able to close that window and after starting TT and enabling ffdshow it should work.

If it still crashes on you try uninstalling any ffdshow and reinstalling.

Once you've got it running successfully with TT you can start messing around with the various filters like resize and the Dscaler sharpen filters.

jvincent;

Thanks for your help. I was able to find those tabs and filters. Unfortunately, TT keeps crashing. Actually, after I tried to enable ffdshow, TT crashed and now no longer starts. I can still see the TT appl. running under "processes".... (Thanks to Ghost it only takes me < 5 min to get back to a clean, stable system).

Do I still need this "MSVCR70.DLL"? I tried with and without - no difference....

My next attempt will be with the Sept version. See if this is any better…

However, my feeling is that I still miss an important step in setting ffdshow up.

Any more suggestions??

Thanks!
_____
Axel

I recommend using ffdshow-20030927.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Can someone PLEASE explain how i use the dscaler and other filters within ffdshow?! I'd like to be able to use ffdshow with MPEG-2 files, XVID, and Divx and would like to know what tools I have available to me to make the best ofthe experience. Thanks.

JBlacklow,

I am sorry to say that my statement that VMR9 works with WinDVD was misleading.
It dose work , but it appears that it only with titles that are not Macrovision protected.
This manifests itself as sound with a black screen.
I am so used to ripping all my DVD's to the hard drive without Macrovison that I forgot about this problem.

So the answer is to Rip to hard drive or make a DVD copy without Macrovision.

If you don't want to do either, you will have to use Overlay unless someone can suggest a work arround.

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

debennett2,

The only useful Descaler filter for use in ffdshow IMHO is the Sharpen.dll.
The other filters are either to slow, don’t work well or crash.

Can you be more specific about what info you require?
Do you have ffdshow working?
Is Descaler installed etc?

Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

Hi,

My system Asus P4PE, P4 2.4 (non-HT) overclock to 3G (666M FSB), single 512M DDR333. Original Radeon 8500 using Cat3.4. WinXPPro SP1, DirextX9.0b. WinDVD 4.5 video/audio decoder, ZoomPlayer 3.2. FFDshow 20031028, Reclock 1.2, SPDIF press-through via motherboard optical out.

Manually add the "Abstract filter" registry entry under WINDVDPR (the bbq web reg file add it under DVD5 so I need to manually create a matching set under WINDVDPR for my WinDVD 4.5)

In ZoomPlayer, select WinDVD Audio, WinDVD Video, WinDVD Abstract DMO, FFDshow, Reclock under DVD filters. In "External" tab, select WinDVD SPDIF press-through and FORCE WEAVE output.

FFDshow processing:

resize don't work in my setup. Those recommanded resize method lanczos/spline with whatever sharpen setting, all give a heavy aliasing picture. Tried many resize resolution from 800x600 to 1440x960. All looks awful! Manybe it's because my low output resolution at 856x480 to match my Panny AE200 projector at 1:1 mapping.

But the Sharpen->unsharp works wonder! At value 12 (more start to look over sharp with EE) the overall picture is quite a bit better than Dscaler using Dscaler Sharpness filter.

The Sharpen->unsharp at 12 is the only FFDshow filter I use in most case.

Also as llamameat suggested, the new denoise3d under Blur&NR really clean up some noisy/grainy content without hurting overall sharpness and detail. So sometimes I also use the denoise3d. I don't use the gradual denoise though to try to keep the original source resolution as high as possible. Btw the denoise3d filter also eats LOTS of CPU cycle!

(I really want to use Dscaler Chroma filter in FFDshow to remove the slight chroma bug effect of the WinDVD video decoder running in software decode mode. But the Dscaler Chroma filter just has NO effect whatsoever in FFDshow. The other Dscaler Sharpness filter and even the Mirror filter does work in FFDshow. I hope you guys may have some hint. Or we need to wait till NVDVD3.0 as Bob said the chroma bug is fixed.)

For good flagged 24/30fps source, that's all it needs!

For good flagged 60i video content, I enable the FFDshow deinterace mode and use the Dscaler MoComp2 video deinterlace method which is THE best video deinterlace IMO in the HTPC world. Beware that MoComp2 also needs much CPU power.

For bad flagged 24fps source, I use FFDshow deinterlace and use the Dscaler Greedy High Motion video deinterlace and enable the "auto pulldown" mode in the deinterlace config. The GreedyHM can usually figure the correct 3/2 pulldown but sometime it does comb a bit. Overall it's better to force in video deinterlace IMO.

That's my story of 2 nights testing so far. Next step is to fine tune the daily operation of the ZoomPlayer as a DVD player such as adjust/learn the hotkey and maybe link with a IR remote for easy control.

Well, I'm back to pure software playback again, all self-contain in the HTPC! :)

regards,

Li On

Originally posted by Axel
jvincent;

Thanks for your help. I was able to find those tabs and filters. Unfortunately, TT keeps crashing. Actually, after I tried to enable ffdshow, TT crashed and now no longer starts. I can still see the TT appl. running under "processes".... (Thanks to Ghost it only takes me < 5 min to get back to a clean, stable system).

Do I still need this "MSVCR70.DLL"? I tried with and without - no difference....

My next attempt will be with the Sept version. See if this is any better…

However, my feeling is that I still miss an important step in setting ffdshow up.

Any more suggestions??

Thanks!
_____
Axel

I've had the problem where I messed up an ffdshow install and because I've got it selected in TT I can't get rid of it / start TT without crashing before.

Since you've got a Ghost image, I'd suggest going through the procedure I described before on the restored image. That's exactly what I did.

Again, make sure you do all the ffdshow config before you enable it in TT.

I haven't had any problems with the October build but it looks the same as the September build from what I can see so if you want to try Sept. first there should be no problem.

I've had the MSVCR70.DLL in there the whole time so I can't say if it makes a difference or not. Probably best to leave it in.

Good luck.

jvincent;

I ghosted to a previous image w/o ffdshow and reinstalled ffdshow-20030927 (as per Owen's suggestion following the steps you had laid out. Got the same crash problem again. - I tried it first without the.dll, then with.

I still feel that I am missing a step or two. My system otherwise is rock solid.

Could you please take another look at your "recipe" to verify that is it complete?

Thanks!
_____
Axel


Originally posted by jvincent
Axel,

Try the following. Disclaimer as follows, I'm typing this from memory since the HTPC is busy right now (kids) so I might make some mistakes.

After installing ffdshow, but before launching TT, you need to do the following.

Under the ffdshow tab of the windows Start menu go to the "Configure Raw only". This will open up a ffdshow configuration window.

Go to the codecs tab and make sure that Raw video shows all supported. In the supported colourspaces section select both YV12 and YUY2.

Since you're just starting I would suggest enabling the following two filters. Under Blur and NR, select Gradual Denoise with a strength of 20.

Under sharpen, select Unsharp mask with a strength of 25. Make sure process whole image is selected.

You should now be able to close that window and after starting TT and enabling ffdshow it should work.

If it still crashes on you try uninstalling any ffdshow and reinstalling.

Once you've got it running successfully with TT you can start messing around with the various filters like resize and the Dscaler sharpen filters.

Strange. I just checked my setup and that should be all you need.

Are you able to run TT is S/W mode without ffdshow installed?

Do you have anything like Divx installed?

Originally posted by jvincent
Strange. I just checked my setup and that should be all you need.

Are you able to run TT is S/W mode without ffdshow installed?

Do you have anything like Divx installed?

I'll try the S/W mode. Need to get a clean image first. Ghosting right now.

I wonder if MyHD or PDVD could cause this problem. Otherwise no Divx or such...

______
Axel

Tried the S/W mode - same problem (TT hangs). I also tried an image w/o MyHD installed - same here....

What am I doing wrong? The installation seems so straight forward.

Do I need to do anything in the "non raw" config tab? What is the difference between the "raw" and the "non raw" BTW?

Thanks!
______
Axel

If TT crashes in S/W mode without ffdshow installed then it sounds like you have something else going on.

Have you ever tried TT in S/W mode before?

Can you be more specific about what info you require?

I DO have ffdshow working (at least in some form even though I don't know exactly how the order works and all of that just yet). I DO NOT have Dscaler installed yet. Do i need a full install of Dscaler to get the filter into ffdshow? Whjat about OTHER filters aside from Dscaler's in ffdshow? Is it possible? This seems to work a lot like how Virtualdub's filters work in a way but I don;t understand where you go to change the processing order. I have the latest version installed. Thanks.

Originally posted by jvincent
If TT crashes in S/W mode without ffdshow installed then it sounds like you have something else going on.

Have you ever tried TT in S/W mode before?

Sorry, I was not clear in my last post. Here it goes again:

TT in S/W mode and without ffdshow installed => TT works fine
TT in S/W mode and with ffdshow installed => TT hangs

_____
Axel

How about this, if you install ffdshow but don't enable it, does TT still work?

BTW, I just checked and the MSVCR70.DLL is in my system32 directory.

One other thing to try is to go back to one of the earlier builds such as the January one.

Originally posted by jvincent
How about this, if you install ffdshow but don't enable it, does TT still work?


Yes, it does.


Originally posted by jvincent
BTW, I just checked and the MSVCR70.DLL is in my system32 directory.


Thanks! At least it seems not to hurt.

Originally posted by jvincent
One other thing to try is to go back to one of the earlier builds such as the January one.

Yep, that's probably my next step...
(I am so glad I have Ghost. It takes me less than 5min to go back to a clean image)

jvincent, thanks again for all your help!!!
______
Axel

debennett2,

If you select a filter type on the left side of the screen, two small up/down arrows appear. You can drag the filter up and down the list.

I believe it is possible to use AVISynth filters in ffdshow but I have not bothered to try.
Regards,

Owen

___________________________
The ffdshow resize-sharpen dude.

I finally got ffdshow to work. Here is what I did: 1. I copied the dll in the systems32 folder, 2. installed the Jan 03 version first, 3. set-up this version (enable raw, etc.), 4. confirmed that TT still works with ffdshow enabled, and finally over-installed the Sept. 03 version, which is now working fine…

Now I have to learn how to apply all those filters...

BTW: what is the difference between the raw and the regular setting menu?

_____
Axel