[nintari]

currently on my htpc I am using a ATI Radeon 9700 with the ATI HDTV adapter. My setup is using XP Media center edition, which when setup properly is incredible! I mainly have my family use the Media Center edition for DVD and am using the NVDVD 2.27 filters. I run XPMCE at 640x480 in a 540p timing and everything looks great. Even get 5.1 out to my receiver .


But for my use on DVD I use PowerDVD XP 4.0 and have it set to launch at a 1080i timing with no overscan (1776x1000). Everything looks great to me but I always hear people talking about things like ffdshow. I decided to try it but didnt notice an improvement. I tried playing with the sharpen mask and denoise area I think....


It may be that I just am not doing this rightso I am asking for help


I tried reading through various posts on what to do but I cant understand everything that is said Which frightens me because I'm a PC/Network Technician and HTPC Stuff is a large hobby lol.


So anyone that is willing to help please pass any information along that you can. you can check out my setup in my signature

 

[Owen]

Did you read this thead:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...36#post1959436


It is not complicated and explains the most usefull filters in ffdshow.

Forget the normal sharpening filters. They are obsolete.

If you still cant work it out. Post again.


Regards,


Owen

 

[nintari]

ok I tried to use ffdshow and resized the image to 1776x1000 which is the res I am using to display at on my HDTV. I set luma and chroma sharpen to 1 and left the de-noise filter to it's default.......


I loaded up PowerDVD (set to use HW Accel and SPDIF, 2417 patched) and started to play Spiderman...I went to the scene where they are all sitting to have thanksgiving dinner since this scene had lots of little details and close ups and etc.....



Well I didnt notice a diffrence........ What am I doing wrong? I tried uninstalling to compare and it looked the same......?

 

[Shawn Pilichis]

Spiderman is not a good candidate for viewing detail because it has none to reveal. Use a Superbit instead. For a 2 hour movie Spiderman is horribly compressed down to half the size it should be for it's running time.

 

[nintari]

ok just got done peeking at lord of the rings and star wars episode 2... going to look at gladiator next.....


I just don't notice it......I'll try some screen grabs to compare.... how do I do this??? I tried to hit the capture button in power DVD and couldnt find what it captured......


Do I need to set anything else or use another player like zoom player and make graphs or someting??? I've never done that before.....

 

[pmerritt]

you have to be in software mode to do a screen grab. i bet you are using hardware assisted decoding. also, if that is the case i don't think ffdshow would be working properly.

 

[Karnis]

Easy....try another SW player. I personally just loaded P-DVD for grins on my HTPC last week and IMHO the PQ is just awful compared to the Sonic decoders. Straight up comparison with both set as DXVA and no post processing. I'm not a WinDVD fan at all but some members swear that the latest Platinum version may even surpass the PQ of the Sonic decoders.

I currently use TheaterTek and it has ffdshow support built-in...no graph building, no registry hacks, nothing, very simple to integrate.