New HDMI Colour Space w/NXE - Page 4

Sounds good. 1 last question if you care to answer. I know you suggest using Auto for hdmi color space in my situation. But, what about Source? That seems to do the same thing with possible less conversation/work as another user mentioned? Appreciate the help....

It looks for whatever the HDMI Black Level setting is set to, as long as the xbox 360 is outputting RGB I can change it on the TV and the xbox 360. I'm not sure what your going on about with less video conversion, there is a consensus that video games are rendered in the xbox 360's frame buffer at RGB PC levels and converted for output.

This is a good post, thank you. A couple of comments, though.

People are saying that the games are *rendered* in PC levels, not that they can't be output at video level. Certainly they can. But theoretically this could cause some banding, etc. I think that in reality the image quality hit that conversion from PC to video levels (or vice versa) causes is very minor.

Seven or eight year old video cards used to do an awful job converting video to PC levels, which made "overlay" mode look terrible. The Xbox 360 is much, much better, so I wouldn't really be concerned about levels being converted, as long as everything looks correct (black level set right, etc).


Many 720p HDTVs will expect PC levels if they are fed their native resolution (1360x768 or 1024x768) over HDMI. For those displays you'll want to either set reference levels to expanded or have the Xbox output a DTV-type resolution (720p, 1080i/p, 480p).



Thank you for bringing this up. In my experience many TVs don't properly convert ycbcr to RGB. So many that unless you're sure that your TV does, it might be safer to just let the Xbox 360 output RGB (since it does the conversion correctly).

Auto and Source appear to have the same effect on my TV.

Games are not rendered at RGB PC levels. This is simply not true. Games are rendered in RGB, but at video levels. I have a client who works at Volition games here in Champaign and I have gotten confirmation on this. He told me they dont render the games and store them at PC levels because games are meant to be played on a TV not PC monitor. When you render at PC levels then it is up to the game unit to convert that to video levels which is additional processing that is unnecessary.

Well, whether games are rendered at PC levels or Video Levels it shouldn't make much difference to what we see on the screen. If the console is set to output RGB at video levels or PC levels, the TV / xbox 360 needs to be set to correctly and the resulting picture should look the same as when the console is outputting analogue component or YCbCr over HDMI. The picture should not look washed out and it should not have black crush.

On the ps3 when RGB is set to Limited instead of full the colors don't look as good on my tv but when set to full it just looks so much better but i do have to increase the brightness somewhat to makeup for the extra darkness when set to full

i'm just unable to get that same balance on my 360 for some reason

i notice in comparison videos on gametrailers that the ps3 tends to be brighter in most games...maybe it's just the combination with my tv and 360

Maybe you should set the xbox 360 to output YCbCr all the time. You can't go wrong with that.

That is correct, There should be no visible difference between the two if your display is capable of doing both. However some displays that at first glance look to be doing RGB full correctly have some major chroma errors. This is why I say set it to standard unless your display absouloutley only works with PC levels.

Seems we might have some discrepancy here ...

When I asked a 360 game dev about the levels he stated they were indeed rendered at PC level (native) but that the 360 would re-map the levels for every output except VGA , so do not assume that what Parasite stated is 'factual' for all outputs . Now what was stated is mostly accurate for HDMI but again there are some variances by display ( and maybe even some variance by developer , maybe they have a choice within the dev tools , which could explain why some games look right , some look washed out and some look too dark ... ? ) .

I can also confirm that what I stated previously is true in that there are no additional settings for VGA other than what was already present in the older dash/firmware . So the new 'additions' only apply to HDMI .

- Jason

I set mine to YCbCr709 for my Kuro 5010. looks great.

I run it at Auto.
Gives my games a good look, and also my Netflix movies.

Running mine in Auto as well.

does anyone else notice you cant tell which movies are HD and which arnt anymore? am i missing something?

Lets throw a pc monitor into the mix. Hdmi color space is not available when using hdmi-dvi. You can only set the resolution and black level. With Expanded being the correct 1. Now when watching videos/movies. Are you suppose to leave it on Expanded since it is a pc monitor?

Yes.

Thanks parasite you cleared up alot of questions I had, and I initally agreed with you I just needed someone to clarify.

Im anxious to try this at home. One odd thing is I have a flea from algolith in my setup i turn processing off when i game. But it still converts rgb to pc levels. Its a problem with it, they decided all rgb would be converted to pc levels.

One thing that should be cleared up is expanded is not pc levels its 0 ire, standard is 7.5 Ire. This is confirmed from an interview with microsoft. And my flea since it changes black level yet.

Anyway with the flea setting rgb to standard looks amazing! I guess the flea would be outputting 0-255 and 7.5 ire but I know that cant be right!

However when I took the flea out and rgb was set to standard or 7.5 ire the picture looked washed out! Not nearly as good, I have no idea why.

SO I took the flea out which should be outputting rgb video levels to my projector now.

But....call of duty 4 the brightness was almost needed to be zero and turned all the way down in the display options, which is not correct, defeault was half way and I asked other gamers maybe some others here could comment, but there is no way the brightness should be turned down almost to zero and I can still read the second bar thas how washed out it was. I had to crank it down almost all the way it was so overly bright and washed out almost to the point in game brightness was non existant. It did not calibrate nearly as good and look as good. AGain brightness was almost turned down to zero and I could still read the barely visable block. It was basically just a terribly overly bright washed out image.

IM so confused by all this, I am going to try ycbcr 709 first because thats how my projector was calibrated. But either my projector does something odd with rgb or the xbox is doing something odd with rgb output.

All I know is ycbcr on hd dvd and blue ray look the best. I might stick with it, but I still want to undertand my rgb issue.

Again I couldnt believe it how washed out call of duty was, even setting brightness to zero, gamma was way off, blacks were crushed even though the picture was washed out, but its because brightness had to be turned all the way down. I didnt get it, because standard and video level rgb is what I should be outputting.

the 709 or 631?

and do you think it's because xbox hdmi is 1.2 and ps3 is 1.3

or does that even make a difference?

Call of duty has the brightness way too high from the offset. Its not you.
I have my tv calibrated by one of the best isf techs in the country, and its doing a perfect 2.2 gamma. I had to turn the brightness down to about 25% on call of duty to get the black level right. On almost every other game I have played the default setting for brightness has been right on or close. I am running hdmi set to source and reference levels set to standard. I think the developers had the game set up with too low a gamma curve which washes the image out. However when you set the black level with the test pattern correctly it looks amazing. You should not set it to where you can not see the text at all, but go to that point and then click up one notch. You want to click up one notch because you want the level to hold when you increase the ire in the image. What I mean is you dont want to have loss of shadow detail when you put bright images on the screen with dark. By making the text completely fade you do this. You want to keep your shadow detail visible on not just dark scenes, but bright mixed with dark as well. I will try to take some pictures of this tonight when I get home showing what I mean. BTW Call of Duty with the black level set right on a pioneer elite 151 running ISF day mode is the Shiz!

709 is simply the HD color space and 601 is the NTSC color space. There really isnt much difference between the two other then some wider color points on a CIE chart. Calibrated displays now are always done with 709 being the standard. There is really no reason to ever use 601 with a digital display.

I've read through and I'm still a little confused. I have a Samsung LNT2354H, the small 23 inch white model. Up to this point I have had the Xbox set to expanded and the Xbox chooses 1360x768 when I select Optimal Resolution. It also turns on Home Theater PC on my tv and its greyed out. It appears to be accepting RGB levels I think. The HDMI black level is on normal and greyed out. Basically I'm asking, what should I set everything to to get the best picture? Xbox: ref. levels standard? HDMI color space source? Any idea guys/gals?

You can't base pq on just XBox settings.

If you use HDMI, you also have to tweak your TV's HDMI Black Level (my past 4 Samsungs have all had this.)

I find that:

TV:

HDMI Black Level: Normal
Black Adjust: Off

360:

Reference Levels: Standard
HDMI Color Space: RGB

That's what works for me. After all this, all you need to tweak is the brightness setting on your TV.

Putting Intermediate or Expanded only adds black crush, in which I have to turn the brightness waaay up on the TV set to make it look normal.

Always test out Normal or Standard settings before messing with Low HDMi black levels, Expanded settings, and anything else that will alter black levels.

My ISF Calibrated Panasonic PZ700U crushes blacks with Expanded. Playing Halo 3, everything looks correct with Source and Standard set. I don't know why they had to make this so complicated, especially when the majority of people game on a TV, not a PC monitor.

You wouldn't believe the nonsense I am seeing on other boards about all of this. Trying to explain that ISF calibration is the standard and that one shouldn't calibrate your set to your xbox, but your xbox to your set is falling on many deaf ears.

Most likely the TV is expecting PC levels because you are sending a PC-style resolution (1360x768). Either us expanded levels or switch to 1280x720 output.

If I set my Samsung TV's HDMI Black Level to Normal it makes my TV expect PC levels, so if I have the xbox 360 set to standard (video levels), I get a washed out picture. Maybe this setting is backwards on some Samsung TVs?

Here's a little table I came up with that is right with my TV:

For correct display of PC Levels when using RGB over HDMI:
Samsung TV - HDMI Black Level: Normal
Xbox 360 - Reference Levels: Expanded
PS3 - RGB Full Range (HDMI): Full

For correct display of Video Levels when using RGB over HDMI:
Samsung TV - HDMI Black Level: Low
Xbox 360 - Reference Levels: Standard
PS3 - RGB Full Range (HDMI): Limited

Once this is set, use a calibration DVD to set the rest of the TV settings, I find that the defaults settings with the TV set to movie mode are very close to the correct settings. The levels should look the same as when you feed the TV YCbCr.

LCD HDTV's are basically computer monitors. When playing games like Half-Life 2 or Portal, you can see that the computer preset is better than the TV preset.

I can't adjust HDMI black level, it is greyed out, although it does say Normal. So Expanded it is? I am reading tons about it creating black crush. I don't have the money for a pro-calibration so I'm doing it the best I can on my own. I just want everything to line up so that I get the best picture I can. I don't use my tv for anything other than gaming and watching dvds on occasion.

Expanded/PC levels only "crush" blacker than black information. For games this doesn't exist and for movies I seriously doubt it would make any noticeable difference with video content either.

I think that most digital displays these days don't do much with BTB/WTW information anyway.

It's greyed out when it's being fed YCbCr.

Hiiiiiiiii...........

Well, I got to tell ya all, finally NXE has juiced up and souped up my Xbox 360 performance and especially color correction is off the hook, making it best among the rest. Seriously just like in computers we have DirectX D3D software upgrade from directx 8 to whatever is now, i think so Directx 10 or something, which speeds up game performance at the same time yielding better shadow and lighting details after every upgrade ......... I swear to GOD NXE has completely overhauled all the graphics and colour displaying capabilities of Xbox 360. It is just like upgrading from windows 98 to straight to Windows Vista not just in visual but performance.

To be honest I didn't give a rat s-hit about whole avatar or theme or menu thing, I was only interested if NXE will bring any update and upgrade in graphic chip software.

If you guys remember I was saying about dull colour and all that thing, it is all resolved ..... I can't be happier then this.

Just one thing ....... with all this improved performance, not only I but everyone is scared of only one issue .... the dreaded RROD .... keep your console well ventilated place guys .... preferred placing position Horizontal and I believe your console wil be safe for a while .... lolllllllll. Eventually every xbox 360 will die, just a question is what can you do to prolong its life.

Regarding Xbox 360, what I believe, it was actualy meant to be played on RGB compliant device such as monitors or tele's with builtin vga ports because games are designed in 0 - 255 color space. Now with the increased hype, requirement, marketing and whatsoever of HDMI forced Xbox 360 developers to integrate HDMI ports in their new Xbox 360 lineup. Before this update Xbox 360 was transferring incorrect color information on HDMI, as on the scale of 0 - 100 where 0 is extreme white and 100 is deepest black, after 80% everything was displayed as black and after 15% everything was displayed was white, no shades in between. Therefore still VGA ports was perfect in displaying accurate white, gray and black shades before NXE and I preferred it. VGA was lacking bit of sharpness whenever compared to HDMI, but I always preferred better color presentation, smooth edges then sharpness.

With this update of NXE everything has been recalibrated, the source (Xbox 360) is outputting now 99.9% accurate color information on HDMI about different white, gray, black shades, thus making it very close to VGA (RGB) color settings.

BTW i wrote in my previous posts as well, if you wana calibrate your tele for gaming, do not use any of the calibration discs, cause all of them are in 16-235 color range. Use calibration image files, I have links in my posts with thread name 'Official LNXXA650 Calibration/Settings Thread - page 53'. Images in Xbox 360 are displayed in RGB format 0 - 255, hence you will be able to accurately calibrate your tele. Just copy these files in any of the usb device, plug it in and use these image files to calibrate. I am tellin ya, you'll love your tele once calibrated.

After calibration, damn games will look more awesome and realistic, especially Gears of War 2.

NTSC tele have got 7.5+ IRE for black. Recommended Reference level is Normal. Do not use any lcd tele feature such as HDMI black, black adjust or any similar options cause it will literally crush black colours. Adjust only standard brightness and contrast option to yield best picture result.

PAL tele have got 0 IRE for black. Recommended Reference level is expanded. Do not use any lcd tele feature such as HDMI black, black adjust or any similar options cause it will literally crush black colours. Adjust only standard brightness and contrast option to yield best picture result.

Remember I my opinion VGA is still better as games are designed on computer using 3d Rendering and Game engines (0-255 color space), none of 'em are made on film reels (16-235 color space) therefore it is very safe to say that if xbox 360 connected through VGA port or HDMI port offering pc connectivity will yield far better result then any other port connected.

Thankss

"Calibration is a simple math, you just got to learn simple equations to master it." by bullswar