[George Watt]

I just bought an ATI Radeon 1650 video card.


How do I expand a DVD to the full 1-255 range?

I did not see any option for overlay in the Catalyst application.


When I setup Zoomplayer and select overlay for both DVD and other video formats I still do not get the expanded range.


How do I do it?


Also, it seems that the Radeon chip has deinterlacing capabilities, so do I disable any deinterlacing in my DVD decoder. It seems there is no point in attempting to do it at two different places.


Thanks!

 

[George Watt]

Anyone?

I am about to return this to the shop and buy an NVIDIA board.

 

[DJ79]

George, I saw your post yesterday, but I thought someone else would educate you on the video vs. PC levels better than I would.


You DON'T want to expand video levels, as that would introduce banding. Actually, many of us here are having the opposite problem with PowerDVD Ultra which expands the levels without asking us, and messes up the picture in the process.


Video is encoded in the 16-235 range, and you want to output to the display exactly that (especially over curent 8-bit digital interfaces). This is not unlike outputting native resolution vs. scaling, but in the color domain.


What you do instead is adjust your display's brightness/contrast to get proper black levels. Unfortunately, that will crush some blacks on your non-video items like desktop and photos.


That said, I always thought that video being encoded in the 16-235 range was suboptimal, but I guess it was decided on for historical reasons.


By the way, this issue has been discussed a lot on this board, as you may have probably already discovered.

 

[George Watt]

Thanks for your reply DJ79.


I am aware of all the pros and cons related to expanding the levels. And I will be the last person to get in the middle of the argument. And hopefully this topic could be confined to the question of how to get the best expanded levels using a Radeon card.


Right now, for me it does not work and I don't quite know why. Before I had an NVIDIA card and I could set it in the registry but now with the Radeon I don't know what to do.


Could it be the card, overlay v.s. VMR, the video decoder?

This is my first ATI card so I have perhaps some very basic questions.


Are there any options in Catalyst to use expanded levels?

Is it possible to arrange it with VMR? If so how?


What I do not want to do is use ffdshow to expand the levels myself.


Best regards,

George.