AVIVO + Cyberlink/ATI Decoder = Nasty image

[Mahoney]

Hi,

I purchased an X1600 for my box in order to use AVIVO to play back video. I installed the Cyberlink ATI decoders as I believe they are the only ones that can use the AVIVO technology, and the latest (6.4) Catalyst driver.

I get my input from a DVB-T capture card - PAL 16:9 MPEG2.

On some things it doesn't look good at all. For instance MI:2 was on last night on ITV. Moving images leave weird shadows or smears - kind of like mouse trail if you enable it. They can stay for quite some time, and are expecially noticeable in dark areas of the screen. Definitely not just LCD response issues!

Anyone have similar experiences? Found a fix?

I have deinterlacing set to automatic and 3:2 detection enabled in Catalyst. I have hardware acceleration enabled in the Cuberlink decoder preferences page (which I had to use Radlight filter manager to find!). Using Windows Media Player 10.

[sharangad]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Hi,


On some things it doesn't look good at all. For instance MI:2 was on last night on ITV. Moving images leave weird shadows or smears - kind of like mouse trail if you enable it. They can stay for quite some time, and are expecially noticeable in dark areas of the screen. Definitely not just LCD response issues!

Anyone have similar experiences? Found a fix?

Yes I had the same thing. You need to use set Deinterlace to bob in Catalyst Control Centre and go to WMP and set it to use VMR High Quality Mode and playback your clip with WMP10. PowerDVD itself always uses the overlay and so can't be forced to not user AVIVO automatic deinterlacing. I had the same thing with both PowerDVD and nVidia's PureVideo decoder. I got it to work with those two settings with the PureVideo decoder. I'm guessing it should work with PowerDVD as well.

I think it may be an issue with 25 fps MPEG-2 clips, as that's what's used in most, but not all PAL countries.

I've created a support ticket with ATi regarding this. For the time being I'm using my nVidia card.

Alternatively, you could disable hardware acceleration in PowerDVD. This should also fix it, but you lost AVIVO as well as all the ghosting trails.

I wanted to try ATi as the nVidia AGP 6600 GT had broken WMV HD playback, to see if it was working. On the ATi card WMV HD works perfectly, however MPEG-2 playback is less than ideal.

[Mahoney]

OK, thanks. Makes sense that it would be a PAL specific thing, given the lack of noise about it! I'll try your suggestions. Thanks for raising the support ticket, too. I might do the same.

[kschmit2]

when you set deinterlace to BOB, you throw away half the vertical lines.

[sharangad]

Originally Posted by kschmit2

when you set deinterlace to BOB, you throw away half the vertical lines.

That's why I'm using a Geforce 6600 GT AGP. Turning off hardware acceleration is the best thing for the Radeon.

[sharangad]

BTW, Setting the deinterlace mode in CCC to vanilla "Adaptive" also works ( as opposed to vector adaptive or motion adaptive ). However, scan lines tend to pop up and its nowhere near as good with jaggies and stuff.

[Alaric]

Hi There,

I'm getting this with TheaterTek in VMR9 mode, it was particularly noticeable in some of the stargate SG1 season 8 (PAL) i was watching the other night. At first i thought it was a problem with my projector and having some form of phospher persistance by having the brightness/g2 set high, but dropping from the DVD window to windows itself and the pictur instantly cleared.

Cya,
Lee

[Murilo]

Is this a pal problem? I just purchased this card, also have a twinhan DVB card, and heard the picture quality was the best with it. But I dont use pal, is this a pal problem?

[sharangad]

Originally Posted by Murilo

Is this a pal problem? I just purchased this card, also have a twinhan DVB card, and heard the picture quality was the best with it. But I dont use pal, is this a pal problem?

Yes it appears to be a 25 fps problem.

[Bignickfly]

Yes same here,

Its the new 6.4 drivers creates some some soft smearing of the HD video.

I upgraded windvd7 and cat 6.4 at the same time, bad move, to try to find the problem

I'll go back to 5.13 and windvd 7 december build its the best combo so far.

[sharangad]

I made some clips out of my PVR's recordings and sent them to ATi as part of my support ticket. They have been able to reproduce the problem but said they don't have a fix for it at the moment.

'tis just a matter of waiting for it to be fixed.

[Calvi]

I have the same issue here in Australia.

I have found that using overlay is better than VMR7 or 9. And also VMR9 Renderless (Exclusive) does not have the issue (or its alot less noticeable anyway).

I'm very happy to see others with the exact same issue as I have been going crazy trying to work out why it looked so bad when the 9200se I had before had a clearer picture.

I was going to raise a ticket myself. I probably suggest the more people who do the greater the priority that will be given to the problem.

EDIT: I have raised a ticket as well.

EDIT: I have tried drivers 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5. They all exibit the problem and it's still pretty bad in overlay mode as well. 6.3 seems the best of the three but theres not alot of difference.

I have also sent a sample capture to ATI and will try out 5.12 and/or 5.13 to see if they are any better in the mean time.

[WillyWonka]

Hi, any news about this damned ghosting ?

[Stanphink]

Have also posted ticket with ATI. They told me it was a display setting that was causing the problem, they were not specific as to what it was. Have re-posted with them but they seem to be in denial.

[Murilo]

Is ghosting my problem as well? Where it seems deinterlacing is not being done, there is a blur of jaggies?

[Calvi]

No its not a blur of jaggies, more like persistance in an old crt display. Smearing and trails in motion etc. Really bad in dark scenes and flesh tones tend to blend into each other.

ATI told me their engineers are working on it. They also said it will be added to the knowledge base a known issue. I kept checking and its still not there. This coupled with my understanding that ATI are generally 2-3 drivers ahead of time, ie catalyst 6.7, 6.8 would be in testing now gave me the feeling we are talking months not weeks.

I applied to be a beta tester (to get a fix quicker) but got no response.

My response has been to buy a nvidia gs7800. Will be installing hopefully tomorrow. Not the answer you are looking for but I cant wait for year for them to sort it out.

If it helps anyone a reasonable workaround is as follows.....

Record SD and HD either in different formats or at least set your system up such that the extension is different. I record SD as dvr-ms and HD as .ts (transport stream). I use Meedio as my htpc front-end and it allows custom graphs for playback (zoomplayer and mpc do too BTW). You could also make SD .tp & HD .ts for eg.

Install ffdshow but set its merit to do not use. Then setup your player so that it always puts ffdshow into the graph for SD content only (dvr-ms in my case). This will mean that for SD files dxva will be disabled so rendering will be software only. No avivo features but no smearing either. For me its much better this way.

You get.....

1. No smearing of SD content.

2. Even a low spec CPU can handle decoding SD in software.

3. You can use ffdshow to resize or add filters etc if you want.

4. Full Avivo on HD content so your CPU does not die and also no smearing as it does not seem to happen on HD files.

Hope this helps.

[anything]

this sounds like the problem i have. could someone take a screenshot of it so i can see (explaining in words is hard)?

this is what my problem looks like:http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/2936/1bad0yh.jpg

i found a fix for my problem, as odd as it sounds it works everytime, maybe it will help you.

open ATI CCC, go to the deinterlace setting page, change setting to weave, hit apply, change to auto hit apply, hit ok, then test.

[Calvi]

Your problem looks alot more like combing/feathering. What decoder are you using?
If you are using dscaler you need to set the output colorspace to NV12 or else the AVIVO functions don't work leading to the effect you are experiencing.

The fix that works for you is also disabling all the AVIVO deinterlacing advantages. With the driver set to weave you may as well be using a 9200SE.

But I understand that you have to do what works to get a reasonable output.

It shouldn't be this way though.

I have installed my Gainward 7800GS+ Bliss and it is... (Bliss that is).

Beautiful output quality (better TV out). Perfect Mpeg2 SD and HD with no smearing/ghosting.

I will admit that I think the AVIVO deinterlacing was slightly better that NVidias Purevideo but not at the expense induced by the denoise filter on SD content.

PS. and no more CCC, I will not miss that either.

[anything]

i get it using any DXVA decoder when not set to weave, its the result of deinterlacing film based 1080i and scaling to 1024x768, strangely it you cant see the problem at higher resolutions.

[Calvi]

Interesting - seems like another bug. I would raise a support ticket with ATI.

This is a different issue to the ghosting/smearing.

I never had any deinterlacing issues with any settings at 800x600 (TV out) or 1280x720p (projector) with my ATI x1600agp unless the decoder was not outputting NV12 colourspace.

Good Luck. JC.

[anything]

i have raised a support ticket, but ATI has been unable to reproduce the issue. ive even been able to get the problem on a nvidia card with purevideo, so its probably not an ATI specific issue.

[Jimmmmbo!]

Just to add my $.02:

I have the same problem with 30fps NTSC. I have an X1900XT running on a Pentium 4 3.4GHz, and the smearing problem in dark scenes is pretty much unbearable. So it's not just a PAL problem.

I also have lousy deinterlacing on 30fps material. It's very jerky in motion scenes. It's at its worst when using FFDShow with or without any processing. If I use just PowerDVD by itself, it's a little better. In the end, I've just started using my regular DVD player for this stuff.

I see it most watching the Alias TV DVDs (season 1). This show tends to have a lot of dark, low contrast scenes.

[talon95]

With the 6.6 drivers I get the smearing when using hardware mode. Going back to the 5.13 drivers fixed this for me when playing 1080i material with PowerDVD. For reference, I have a X850Pro.

Anyone know which driver release actually broke the 1080i playback?

Dave G.

[sharangad]

ATi have marked my support ticket as resolved. But there doesn't appear to be a fix for the problem. Could someone report on whether Cat 6.6 fixes things for them?

[talon95]

Well, as I said above, I switched from Cat 6.6 which had problems. I don't know if it's exactly the same problem or not, but sounded like it from the descriptions.

Dave G.

[Calvi]

My support ticket was marked as resolved weeks ago. Their resolution was that ATI engineers are working on it. It still is not in the known issues yet and I would expect that Catalyst 6.7 and 6.8 are already in beta testing so I wouldn't expect a resolution until September or later?

The best workaround I can give is to use software mode for SD material. This can be automated by variuos players by adding NVPP or FFDSHOW to the filter graph for SD content. Otherwise you can by Nvidia or wait & wait & wait.

[sharangad]

ATi have acknowleged the MPEG-2 smearing as an open issue with the Radeon X1k series in Cat 6.7.

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/...estionID=22814

It's taken them three months just to officially acknowledge their motion adaptive noise reduction failure. I sure hope they fix it.

[talon95]

Originally Posted by sharangad

ATi have acknowleged the MPEG-2 smearing as an open issue with the Radeon X1k series in Cat 6.7.

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/...estionID=22814

It's taken them three months just to officially acknowledge their motion adaptive noise reduction failure. I sure hope they fix it.

Thanks for the update. I just tried 6.7 and there's certainly no improvement.

Dave G.

[sharangad]

Catalyst 6.8 is out and ATi claim to have fixed the issue with MPEG-2 smearing.

"Playing an MPEG2 video clip on a system running Windows XP and containing an ATI Radeon® X1x00 product no longer results in corruption being noticed during the playback of the MPEG2 file. Further details can be found in topic number 737-22814"

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206...ase_notes.html

You can get the driver from here:

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/....asp?deptID=89

Unfortunately I no longer have my Radeon X1k card. Could someone comment on whether 'tis fixed?

[talon95]

My problem is gone, but I bought a Nvidia card.

Dave G.