OK, I'm scared. I have my HD-DVD/Blu-Ray HDPC up and running, with PowerDVD Ultra playback on a GeForce 8500GT. Today I did a quick test with one of the two hi-def movies I have so far, Van Helsing (I love that movie!) on HD-DVD versus my old HTPC with FFDShow, AVISynth resize sharpen, a bit of dScaler sharpen and 3D Noise reduction, Haali media splitter and nVIDIA 3+ video filter on a GeForce 6600. What scared me was that the difference in image quality was so small.

I was using my current resolution, 1152x864, because I didn't have time to experiment with 720P or 1080i today (that'll have to wait until the weekend). Still, shouldn't the difference be very clear? The two PC's had very similar sharpness and image quality on the Windows desktop.

I hope it's not my projector that has reached as far as it can, because that's the one thing I won't replace (read: cant afford to replace) in a loong time. Shouldn't very lightly used tubes, HD-144 lenses and better RGB amps be enough to make this ting show the difference between the two formats?

Your pj setup must be lousy if you see almost no difference.

I basically don't watch DVD anymore as HDTV/HDDVD/Bluray are so vastly better and I only run at 1280x720 on my NEC XG.

All the ffdshow rubbish in the world will never turn dvd into anything but processed low definition mush.

That's a very strange resolution btw. Are you using a 4:3 screen? If not, bump it to 1440x960 or something similar.

Slightly antagonistic towards upsampling, are we? ;) Yes, I have a 4:3 screen, but I am going to change the resolution for HD. I just watched Spiderman 3, and that looked fantastic...as soon as I went from XP to Vista. I think there's something funky going on with the renderer in XP. Probably overlay. So I guess even though I don't much like Vista I'm gonna have to endure that for HD-DVD/Blu-ray.

Just realistic. I use ffdshow with lanczos4 resize+sharpen. It makes dvd look as good as it can but any HD absolutely blows it out of the water.

You can use vmr9 as the renderer in xp, it's better than overlay and probably equal to EVR in vista.

Is it possible to choose renderer in PowerDVD? I have been around all of the options, and I haven't found any way to choose renderer.

Don't think you can choose in Powerdvd. I use Theatertek, you can try zoomplayer, which would be my 2nd choice.

I was thinking about the renderer for the HD stuff. Zoom Player (which is always my player of choice) doesn't really do HD-DVD/Blu-Ray yet, as far as I know.

Mastiff,

get the basics right.
On your projector you gotta go with 1920 x 1080i.
Compare King Kong and Casino Royale on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray to their DVD counterparts - the difference is HUGE.

Oliver

I was thinking of that, yes. But I feared that 1080i would be too high for the projector and give a soft image. I will try both 720p and 1080i this weekend, if I can find some place to chase my wife away to... ;)

I was thinking of that, yes. But I feared that 1080i would be too high for the projector and give a soft image. I will try both 720p and 1080i this weekend, if I can find some place to chase my wife away to... ;)

It is the other way around - 720p looks softer than proper 1080i.
Trust me on this one, 1920 x 1080i will look the most detailed.

Thanks! I'm in 1080i now, and it does look promising, but I have a problem with PowerDVD: Fullscreen is more like half screen, with the image shrinked so that I get black on 1/4 of the width on each side! Gonna ask about that one in the HTPC forum.

AVISynth resize sharpenWhat you have to realize is that very few people know what AVISynth is, even fewer have ever seen it in action. And people that actually use it? On this forum, probably just you and I.

AVISynth, set up properly (and that's a BIG stipulation because it's very hard to setup), on an HTPC with enough speed to run aggressive settings, does magical things to the picture. What are actually sharpening artifacts convincingly appear to be added detail.

I've thought many, many times what you say Mastiff. I thought it last night in fact. I watched Spiderman 3 on Blu-ray a couple of nights ago. It looked pretty good I guess. Last night I watch an episode of Deadwood on SD DVD. No ifs, ands or buts, SD Deadwood looked better on my HTPC at 720p than Spiderman looked on my PS3 at 1080i.

I like AVISynth so much that I spent a small fortune a year ago upgrading my HTPC so I could run more aggressive settings. It really makes a good SD DVD transfer look great.

Mastiff, a few tips that you may find useful:

If you have the horse power to pull it off, resize BEFORE you run AVISynth. That way you're sharpening a lot smaller pixels, and the resulting picture is much sharper and detailed. But, the smaller pixels result in a much higher pixel count, so it requires a lot of CPU power to process and sharpen all of those pixels.

Try the sharpen filter in the later Nvidia drivers. There's 2 different ones. One's good and one's pretty bad. I can't remember which is which. Try both and it will be obvious which is the good one. I run it at 60%. I like it much better than the dScaler filter, which use to be my preferred filter until AVISynth came along.

Thanks for the tips, Phil! I actually thought that AviSynth was a bit more common, but maybe I'm wrong. I guess many of the CRT people run scalers from Crystalio and stuff like that, with regular HD-DVD players.

As for the resize I resize close to the top of the chain, only below the Denoise. As long as I'm able to get the filters running multithreaded (which the AviSynth stuff should do with the MP.dll) I have horsepower to do almost anything. At the moment I have a problem getting fluid motion with too high resize, but I think there's something funky somewhere. I'm gonna try with a Radeon HD2600 instead of the 8500. And besides I'm having hysterical tearing in anything but Renderless Exclusive, which is equally hysterically unstable on Vista. Gonna be interesting to see what that HD2600 can do! Another thing is that I'm gonna try another sound card, the built in card in the motherboard may be creating trouble as well.

I run zplayer/ffdshow/avisynth. I'd be using limitedsharpenfaster but my htpc box is just a hair too slow (which is not bad as it's only a Pentium D at 2.6). Probably going to upgrade the horrific motherboard so I can clock it up to 3.5 or 4 (these chips are forgiving) and I should be able to make it go.

I suspect that it's possible to be more aggressive with upscaling and sharpening on a CRT than on a digital, even with the same literal resolving resolution on the screen. And yeah, HD is going to look better than SD; there's more information. But eyes are funny things, and you can trick them fairly easily.

One odd thing I found when playing with a bluray vs. sd screenshot of the fifth element was that even doing a bilinear scale of the SD image and then throwing 'high resolution' gaussian noise on it made it LOOK higher resolution - I guess your eyes see the high resolution errors and assume the data must be high resolution too. So you can get better-than-you-oughta results from careful scaling and trickery, but not as good as real data (presuming you can resolve the full resolution with your eyes and equipment).

What gets me are the guys who are spending ten, twenty thousand dollars for upscalers that are probably not doing nearly as good a job. Even if they don't want to set it up, they could find somebody to do it for them for a quarter they're going to spend for the 'Faroudja' mansize-label on their racks.

I've thought many, many times what you say Mastiff. I thought it last night in fact. I watched Spiderman 3 on Blu-ray a couple of nights ago. It looked pretty good I guess. Last night I watch an episode of Deadwood on SD DVD. No ifs, ands or buts, SD Deadwood looked better on my HTPC at 720p than Spiderman looked on my PS3 at 1080i.



Phil,

can you do screenshots of your HTPC picture with your software player, preferably with and without the enhancements you use ?
If you can you could take a few screenshots of the same scenes that are in the screenshot thread over on the HDTV software forum.

And might I suggest to compare the Spiderman Blu-Ray with the Spiderman DVD and not with a made for TV series - it is a bit of a weird comparison ;)

Oliver

Oh and one other thing that occured to me:

Any CRT will to some extent reduce the visible difference between HD and SD sources. How much depends on the CRT and its setup.
But it definitely helps to optmize the projector setup for the best source and the resolution it is played back at.

For the 808 I would suggest to use 1080i and with a good setup small text on the desktop should be nicely readable. There are a few screenshots in different threads of what for example Mark_A_W and Mike Parker have accomplished with their 8" units and that is definitely something to strive for.

Yeah, you're right. The small text is very readable. The problem right now is in PowerDVD, which shows the HD content in around half size in the middle of the screen! As for Mark and Mike I'm fully aware of their wizardry! :) I have my own wizard, but he haven't got time to help me until next year, so I gotta find something I can live with in the meantime.

As for Mark and Mike I'm fully aware of their wizardry! :)

LOL ! That was a good one :) I did not want to imply that witchcraft was involved but thought it would be nice to have a frame of reference for what can be expected when everything is optimized. And I suggest now that your wizard is unavailable to make efforts to improve upon your own wizardry ;)

The problem right now is in PowerDVD, which shows the HD content in around half size in the middle of the screen!

At 1080i ? That sounds strange.
At half the size you only got half the resolution so you're basically going back to not much more than DVD resolution and to make things worse on a much smaller phosphor area.

And something else: To get proper 1080p with an ATI card I think you gotta use a setting that is called something like 1080i/30 or 1080/30. If you do a search you will find the info. Might be that something like that is also necessary for the Geforce cards. I do not know too much about that as I always use p resolutions.

Thanks, I have found out that the reason for the HD movie problem is that PowerDVD doesn't like 1080i in the later versions. So rolling back to an earlier version fixed that. Unfortunately it also took away my ability to watch Spiderman 3, even from the hard drive! :(

And I will read the HD2x00 thread in the HTPC forum, I know there's a lot of stuff like that there. So tomorrow I'll get my HD2600, and then we'll see how that fares.

SD-DVD is a sow's ear. The best SD-DVD's are merely watchable. The best HD has a, "jesus christ, this is like having the original reel of film in my home" affect.

If that was true, I wouldn't want it! Good DVD movies are a lot better than the annoying judderfest that is regular film reels! One of the reasons I don't go to the movies anymore... And tell me, have you ever seen a good DVD enhanced by FFSshow and AviSynth on a good projector?

Umm...ahh...I haven't done anything particularly fancy. My XG setup sure could use some work.
About the only unusual thing I've done (& Dave at about the same time), was try 1080i 72hz on a whim, and Kai went with 1080i 96hz, which I've subsequently changed to (mainly due to reclock issues at 1080i 72hz with my 2600XT video card).

I do know what you guys are on about with AVIsynth and Ffdshow, I've just never bothered trying the latest settings, as I don't watch DVD anymore on the projector.

HD really is that much better.

Umm...ahh...I haven't done anything particularly fancy. My XG setup sure could use some work.


Come on, no need to blush now ;) I did not see sooo many screenshots of actual text or resolution patterns on here and remembered that you and Mike posted some so I thought this might be a good starting point. From what I saw your extra was setup pretty well as you once posted some screenshot from the Nokia pattern. Which by the way will be hard to beat in uniformity with the XG LC :D


I do know what you guys are on about with AVIsynth and Ffdshow, I've just never bothered trying the latest settings, as I don't watch DVD anymore on the projector.

HD really is that much better.

That's my impression too after having seen a few PC's that claimed to have the latest ffdshow/lanczos whathaveyou trickery, no surprise there given the vastly higher resolution of the HD media. That's why I asked Phil for a screenshot of the scaled picture directly from his software player as I have yet to see one of those SD DVDs coming close to their more detailed HD counterparts.

Oliver

Yeah, the Xtra's optics spank the XG LC, particularly in the corners. I CANNOT get them as sharp.

Xtra is a really, really nice projector.

But the LC clarity and pop is well worth it :)

Yeah, we should get together some people to post digital screenshots (ie, print-screened, no projector quality effect) of their ffdshow stuff. I'm pretty curious what results are out there.

The quality of the DVD print seems to have a huge impact. Some of the new stuff (Transformers, in particular, seems to be a good print) looks almost uncompressed when you do point upscaling so you can see the pixel relationships raw. And some stuff... not so much. :p

But the LC clarity and pop is well worth it :)

LC makes quite a difference, makes you forget about the corner focus immediately :)