Real Bad Picture for TV

[ba_baracus]

I am having a really bad picture with my TV (DVB-T). I see that the picture is terrible through mediaportal using Purevideo codecs. An example is when watching football the blur is terrible around the players and the white lines on the pitch are very jagged. I am trying to get the best picture possible and would like to upscale the SD signal to HD. I have tried using FFDshow but without any good results. Is NVidia purevideo able to upscale? Can I use purevideo as a postprocessor? FFDshow has given me no improvements so far. I get excellent quality for both DVD and HD content only TV is rubbish

Hardware:

Mitsubishi DLP Projector: 1080P
Athlon Dual Core X64 - 2300
XFX Nvidia 8400GS - HDCP (DVI)
2GB DDR2 RAM

Software:
Vista Ultimate X64
MediaPortal TV Engine 3 (SVN)
Mediaportal 2.3.0 (SVN)
Nvidia Purevideo
FFDShow


Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Lotsofjazz]

Your info is a bit limited, so I just suggest some things you should check/try.

You Nvidea card should be able to put out any signal you want, as long as it is somewhat compattible with the input signal. So YES when input is SD digital TV (Like with DVB-T), it should be able to output a HD TV signal. BUT if input is PAL, you should set output also to be PAL, because otherwise your videocard could have a hard time to sync the input signal with the output signal (It will work, though, but with fast movements, you might experience what is called Tearing.. later more)

Make sure that DVI Out is compattible/the same as your TV Input, so when DVI-Out is set to 1080P@50Hz (PAL), make sure your TV DVI/HDMI Input is set the same (Most TV's will sense this automatically, but you should be able to check this in one of the OSD menu's of your TV).

Watch TV in TV Format, Monitor Format (TV used as PC monitor, on VGA input or PC-Input) will introduce interpolated pixels, hence, reduce sharpness, more blurr. So do not use PC input, to watch TV, but make sure your Nvidea puts out a real TV signal as output (HDTV or HDMI output) when you watch TV

If your TV has a HDMI input, try to use that one, and also use the HDMI output of your Nvidea card if it has one, maybe you must buy a DVI to HDMI conversion adapter to convert the DVI output signal to HDMI and also need to set it as such in your Nvidea card software. Again, make sure your Nvidea card puts out a real TV signal and not a PC Monitor signal.

Make sure that the HDMI/DVI Output is compattible with the TV broadcast signal, so when you are in PAL area, make sure the refreshrate is set to be 50Hz (1080P @50Hz PAL or 1080i @50Hz) or a multiple of 25(25, 50, 75 or 100Hz), if set to 60 Hz or worse, 85Hz or something, your videocard will have a hard time to sync the broadcast signal with the output signal, most of the time causing terrible tearing of the image

Make sure Vsync is turned on ALLWAYS, search the Nvidea website to find out how to do that (Vsync sometimes also called "wait for vertical refresh" (like ATI))

1080P@50Hz, maybe too demanding for yor system, try to use a lower Format, like 720P@50Hz may improve picture quality significantly, because a higher frame rate can be reached and fewer frames dropped. It is a bit trial and error to find out what is best for your system. First make sure all of the above is set correctly, then play with this setting

Try to use Cyberlink codecs and set them to use hardware acceleration, in stead of ffdshow (no hardware acc) and purevideo. My experience is that Cyberlink(both Mpeg2 and H264 codec) works best with digital TV, I have tried CoreAVC, and Cyberlin-k in software mode, but withe CoreAVC I had terrible audio sync problems, and with cyberlink in software mode, a lot of stutter.

If you are operating under Vista, you should set in Mediaportal ONLY Enhanced Video Rendering and turn off (uncheck) all VMR9 settings, because VMR and EVR seem to interfere with each other (personal experience, cant really explain why.. but when I turned off all VMR9 settings, HDTV played back much smoother)

In your Nvidea software, there must be something about De-interlacing.. If you set your DVI-Out to 1080i/720i, this might be a very important setting to play with.

Generally speaking it is very important that all refresh rates, frequencies etc, are "in sync" with each other. That when you are receiving a PAL signal, you do not set your TV and Nvidea card to use NTSC. To use the highest resolution possible does not allways guarantees the best quality picture, because it can be very demanding to render, and to do that many frames must be dropped resulting in stutter or a more blurred image. Sometimes Hardware decoding is worse then software decoding (with ffdshow or CoreAVC), I use software decoding for movies, for TV hardware decoding works better with my setup.

So it it is a lot of trial and error to find the best setup, search this forum for more information, tips and tricks.

I am sure you will find a good setup, with such a good video card and wonderfull projector TV.

Oh, last but not least!! The DVB-T signal may be of quastionable quality as well !! If something bad comes in, well, it is hard to make it good.. SD is at the most 576P, with live TV this even maybe reduced to 480i or less (converted analogue signal)!! To make that 1080P will require introducing quite a bit of interpolated image lines by your Nvidea card.. so no wonder it gets a little blurred then. You could compare this with these low format youtube movies watching full screen.. terrible! If watching HDTV movies does not give you any problems, it could be this simple that the TV signal is so low in resolution, it is hard for the Nvidea card to make it any better. If this is the case, reduce the image size on the projector should improve the quality a bit(dont lower the resolution, but project the current resolution on a smaller area)

Lots

[ba_baracus]

Wow, thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed reply. I will definately try your suggestions over the next couple of days and let you know how I get on. There are so many options I think that I will spend some time tweaking the settings. Like I said, it's only TV that is te real disappointment for me so hopefully your advice will help improve things.

[bigflause]

I have the exact same issues. here is a screen shot.

I'm using Vista 32bit 1920 x 1080 @ 59hz (tired 50 as well), 8600 gts, latest drivers, Inverse telecine, EVR, power dvd 7 codecs (same with pure video).

normal slow moving TV is perfect. except for block of solid colour I will get the same pixel blocks in the colour.

when I watching footy it just goes mad.

any help would be really great as I am a big footy fan.

[ba_baracus]

bigflause,

I took a look at your attached screenshot, this is EXACTLY the same problem I face, still havn't been able to improve things yet, but am still trying different settings. Really need to get things sorted so I can enjoy the footy.
Are you using tv server or mediaportal standalone?

[bigflause]

I tried both. TVserver seems to work better. I wondering if this is just part of upscaling the picture to 1080p? maybe it's something we can't fix.

[fromaron]

Try to uncheck everything in DirectShow filter settings for VMR9.

[bigflause]

the latest svn does this automatically for you. you can no longer have vmr9 settings and EVR checked.

[Lotsofjazz]

The picture seems rather normal to me.. I mean, SD TV is not HD TV and with upscaling to 1080P this doesnt get any better. It wont surprize me if you set the output to a lower format, like 720P, picture quality will improve significantly while watching live SD TV. At least that is what worked for me.

Lots

[ba_baracus]

I have a humax 9200t that I will hook up to my display to compare the picture quality, then I will drop the resolution on my HTPC with MP so that it should output native SD. Then I will be able to compare the quality between the 2. So maybe it is true that we have no hope trying to upscale SD to HD to improve pic quality.