upscaling standard dvd movies to 1080p using ffdshow and your htpc - Page 5

the point is, to get the best quality in sd and bd disks.
at the moment im trying to get the best quality on 1080p bd movies, but i think thats not possible for me.

I did the setup y'day. I have Intel i5 with 4GB RAM. Still i get terrible lag for the Avisynth advanced settings. I went for the medium settings. Not sure what has changed recently.

exactly!!! Your cpu is not enough.. and these videocards are a waste if only support game acceleration ;/ ( when ati/nvidia will release cards for video playback... and not only for games)

solution: resize your videos 1080->720 before apply avisynth scripts

Well, I've never had a problem with the size issue. Using K-Lite 64/32, and have had great general luck. In an effort to see about some improvements, I gave the guide a go. All work outside of the AVISynth script.. turn on AVISynth, and *boom* MediaCenter crashes like crazy, doing damn near anything.

Running x64 Win7 Pro, have Avisynth 2.58 in, filters in place, etc. just blah. Altered the X64 FFDShow config and the x32 FFDSHOW.

I can alter any/all settings, but turn on AVISynth and *boom* whole thing crashes like no one's business. So for now, I'll leave it alone. Call the rest all good

Well, I just recently upgraded to Windows 7, and I am going through the setup again (should have written down what I had before...). I also changed my video card from a 8800GT to a HD5750 (Powercolor fanless SCS3 model). I loaded the recent package from the first post and did the installations, etc..

I have a very strange issue. If I resize to 1920x1080, I simply get a black screen. If I resize to 1900x1080, the video is shown fine... I know I can't run the Avisynth settings since my CPU can't handle them (E6600, non-overclocked...I might overclock some now that my new HTPC case seems to have very good airflow around the CPU...my core temps are 20-22C at idle, not sure of load yet since I have yet to run benchmarks since changing things around). But in the past I was at least able to do de-interlacing (going to try and figure out how to let the 5750 do that now), some de-noise and edge sharpening, and finally upconvert to 1920x1080 before without CPU issues.

Anyone have ideas?

Well, I punted and re-installed MPC-HT, ffdshow, and my graphics drivers. This at least seems to have fixed the 1920x1080 black screen issue.

Still trying to figuring out how to use the ATI hardware deinterlacer and ffdshow scaler/upconversion. In fact, I don't think I have seen the ATI deinterlacer work at all yet.

Under the output section of FFDShow, do you have 'set interlace flag in output media type' checked? That was what I needed to check to get my nVidia to do hardware deinterlace.


On another note, I'm amazed that noone (espicially 8:13) has even tried to answer some of the questions I voiced a little earlier in this post. That makes me wonder if any experts even follow this thread.

Yes, that is checked and the Method and Field Order are both set to auto. Output is also set to NV12.

Did you also set the output in Media Player Classic to VMR9 (windowed) as opposed to VMR9 (renderless)?

You have to output in YV12 for the hardware deinterlacing to work. This setup has you do a RGB conversion so hardware deinterlacing doesn't work. I find that if I run into interlaced material the ffmpeg deinterlacer in ffdshow works fine.

I use NV12 for hardware deinterlacing just like the instruction pictures on the first post state and it works perfectly.

If I remember, I tried that and it didn't work. I probably have them backwards. Lord knows how many different settings I have been through so far. LOL.

Would you say that you notice a difference between NV12 and RGB32? I might give it a try again. The old lady likes to watch the previews sometimes and most of those are interlaced.

So. In order to use Vector adaptive. I have to change the RGB32 to NV12 and uncheck high quality RGB conversion. Select NV12 and...Renderer? VMR9 or EVR-CP?

I have never been able to get this to work just right. That's why I ask.

EDIT
It worked YAY!!! I was missing the interlaced check box on the re-size menu.

anyway I see that there are other thread in this forum with better framedoubling scripts.. so Im sure 8:13 will update with the new ones as soon that testing will finished

Ok now I have a big problem. I wanted to switch back to RGB32 to see if I can tell a difference. Well... now that doesn't give me a video output at all anymore WTF? Now no other output color spaces work except for NV12 and to be honest it kinda gave everything the ever so slightest blue hint. I really prefer RGB32 but that is a no go now. ARG....

Okay, someone else who just did the setup and has a problem:

Just about everything is working well. XviD/DivX files are upscaled and look great, and sometimes DVD movies look great. But when I try to run a DVD, either the menu is completely black (no video) but I can get to the movie by skipping to the right chapter or the menu works fine but the movie is completely black.

Is this a known issue? Any idea of how to resolve it?

I'm using Zoom Player 5 with the latest setup from this thread. My ffdshow came with Combined Community Codec Pack (2009-9-09) and is version "r3065". XP Pro SP3, Intel Core Duo, nVidea GTX6600, 2gb RAM. When I do get an upscaled picture, I have no problems with lag or the like.

8:13,

First let me thank you for your efforts on this. Your guide has given me a pretty strong start in understanding the ideas behind all this so that I can customize it to my liking better.

Can you shed some more light? Your answers don't really help clear anything up for me. Details below.

Lip sync - you say its because my CPU is "weak". Its a Core i3 530 using the 'medium' settings. Are you saying that the i3 530 isn't enough to handle this (even though it hovers at 30-50% CPU usage)? If thats the case, perhaps you could post some minimum recommended hardware specs? Another idea would be to post your system specs and CPU usage for each batch of settings you recommend...that could be very helpful as well.

Raw video - Your answer doesn't make any sense to me. Based on what I've been able to find, it looks like the raw video setting allows FFDShow to be used to do post-processing when decoders other than FFDShow are used. If FFDShow is the decoder being used, it appears to me that raw video doesn't need to be checked. In fact, if you're using your system like I am (for both SD and HD content), enabling raw video causes complications (profiles would have to be configured so that HD doesn't get processed like SD, DXVA is disabled, etc). In my case, having raw video disabled and using the FFDShow decoder for Mpeg2 (with AVISynth, resize, etc) seems to work okay to me, I just want to know if I'm losing anything doing it this way.

RGB conversion - The best info I could find on this is that certain post-processing functions can sometimes be done faster in the RGB colorspace. Is this why you prefer RGB? Can you help us understand why you chose to disable everything other than RGB and force the conversion?

Just so you know. I have never, I repeat! NEVER! gotten the medium settings to work properly. The lipsynch is always screwed up for me with LSF config and I have an i5 750 @3.6Ghz. The only real reason to use Avisyth at all is for Motion compensation. Also LSF looks POOR on HDTVs. The standard unsharpmask sharpener in ffdshow works much better for this purpose.

About RGB conversion. I can tell a small difference in colors compared to NV12, but this goes away when I recalibrate duh.. Currently I prefer to use NV12 for everything and not force the RGB color conversion, as it is just not needed and gives extra processing overhead in FFdhsow. With NV12 you can now use EVR-CP renderer and you get vector adaptive de-interlacing for everything and hardware decoding for x264 and VC-1. That is If you have an ATI card or Nvidia with a G92 GPU or newer. That is most people! So, hardware de-interlacing for all material and hardware decoding and de-interlacing for most HD video and pretty much all bluerays.

@8:13
You can't tell me that interlaced content never crosses your screen. Tons of disk menus are interlaced and most previews on the disks are interlaced. I guess if you don't mind the menus and previews being totally craptastic and unwatchable, then it is no big deal, because the movie it self is progressive. Matter of fact, there is a lot of animated material on DVD that is interlaced. The wife brought one home last week. Donte's Inferno. I didn't want to watch it But she did. What was I to tell her? I'm sorry sweat heart. I can't fix the ugly lines because then I can't force RGB32. That would have gone over about like a turd in a punch bowl.


It also happens to be just about the only one I can find that works properly! I wouldn't have any HTPC satisfaction if it wasn't for you sir. Thank you very much.


Noted and fixed.

madVR only works with YV12, fwiw.

Will all of this work with Win 7 X64? If not I was thinking about downgrading to x86

Hmm.. someone else noticed what I did.. I'm using K-Lite 5.7x with the x64 bit extensions (3.2 I believe). My FFDShow Video configuration shows AVISynth not detected.

As to the person above who notes that a Phenom 9950 is simply "not strong enough" Pusha. If that's the case, then there is something wrong with the configuration. HTPC shouldn't need to be damn gaming computers. That's a 2.6Ghz QC. Which would put it near the high end when this thread was started, so people were apparently doing something with much less then, so it would be more helpful to address why the crash.

I've tried this on an I3/530 and a Phenom II/940 config.. exactly as noted, but bombs every single time.

my video is fine, but my audio "stutters," skipping syllables, notes in songs, etc.

what can i do about this? again, while my cpu is at 80% with the midrange avisynth, the video is awesome.

help.

I'm only using AVISynth stuff for SD. I stated this previously several times. Plus my HDD is a SSD (Intel w/ TRIM), so my HDD subsystem's throughput capabilities are already FAR beyond what you would get with the Windows page file on its own traditional harddrive. This doesn't even come close to explaining the lipsync issue.

Soon I'll be getting off my bum and doing some REAL lipsync tests (using a lipsync circle beep test pattern) and I'll report back once thats done.

As for raw video, I'll investigate that more when I do the lipsync tests and report back.

As for RGB conversion, dithering makes sense. I'll probably try to figure out why levels get whacked out when I do RGB conversion later when I do the tests mentioned above.

Thanks for the guides 8:13, I've been gratefully following them these past couple of years

Got a weird issue with the new 'mid range' settings this time around though, when subtitles appear on a DVD they cause a slight colour change - things take on a slight greenish hue while the subs are showing on screen and when they go everything returns to normal so watching something with subs is a constant back and forth between colours.. Quite distracting, particularly with black and white films (which I spend a fair bit of time watching). From fiddling around turning things on and off it seems to be the resize which is doing it, which surprised me. The only thing I change there from your settings is I have 'Keep original aspect ratio' checked rather than 'No aspect ratio correction' 'cos I've always found that to cause less problems on my setup.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm pretty baffled myself..

Cheers

I have been reading up on this guide and had just a few questions before trying it. If i choose to use these settings and alterations to play my stored DVD's, will it cause conflict with CoreAVC 2, which i currently have setup in MPCHC for gpu accelerated playback of h264 files. I am running a gt240 card specifically for this reason. I don't remember seeing an answer to whether or not this works in Win 7 Ultimate. I currently have MB setup in WMC with MPCHC setup as a seamless external player.

What you're describing is totally doable. In MPC-HC under external filters, add CoreAVC, set it to prefer, and move it to the top. This way any h264 files will hit it and use it, anything else will pass to the next thing in the list (ie, FFDShow). I also disabled h264 in FFDshow just for good measure.

BTW, I've done a little bit of more detailed testing regarding lipsync. With AVISynth turned on, the lipsync is never any better than a frame or two off (video behind the audio). I used a lipsync test pattern to determine this. With regular video, its just enough to recogonize that something isn't right, but difficult to tell what it is.

I have a i3 530, 2 GB of RAM, Intel SSD. The above was with the 'medium' settings. I've played around with some of the filters built into FFDShow and get comparable quality, but without the lipsync issues. Bye bye AVISynth...

Tried to set this up today and when i went to enable ffdshow in external filters, it was not available as an option? What am i doing wrong?

I have everything setup according to the guide.

I have everything setup, but when i went to play movie in mpchc, i had a prompt at the top of the screen saying, script error, not setmtmode avaialble or something like that. I checked to make sure the plugins were in the appropriate places. Waht's going on.

Sounds like you're having AVISynth problems. If you feel like you have to use AVISynth, you need to make sure you followed all the instructions, in particular replacing the file in windows\\system32 (if I remember right). Otherwise, just use the various filters (sharpen, etc) built into FFDShow and enjoy movies that start playing quickly and don't have lip sync issues....

I like the idea of being able to drop the avisynth addition, but i want to have it working so that i can have a comparison. Where do you tweka ffdshow filters, in mpchc(renderer settings) or ffdshow video config. Renethex who did the thread on HTPc builds says that internal upscaling within gpu filters does as good a job as all these special settings? what do you think. i am tallking specifically about dvd's. Looked at MadVR but it doesn't work well with dvd playback( i am assuming they mean SD)