Real Bad Picture for TV

[bigflause]

If you look closely at the picture you can see the outline of the players and white lines and very pixelated. you will need to zoom in on the picture. It obviously look much worse in real time and displayed in 1080p?

I will give running it at a lower resolution a go tonight while the liverpool game in on

[Lotsofjazz]

Originally Posted by bigflause

If you look closely at the picture you can see the outline of the players and white lines and very pixelated. you will need to zoom in on the picture. It obviously look much worse in real time and displayed in 1080p?

I will give running it at a lower resolution a go tonight while the liverpool game in on

Let us know your experience when running at lower resolution (and probably HIGHER frame rate (50Hz?) )

You know, this is also the reason 100Hz televisions are so popular these days, then the TV itself can increase the frame rate from 50Hz to 100Hz, by interpolating an extra frame between two individual frames.. and you really notice! I have seen it on a 100Hz TV of a friend of mine.. no blur at all, razor sharp, also with fast movements. Text Ticker (like the stock numbers scrolling horizontally below CNN during the day) you can read normally .

Lots

[ba_baracus]

My Mitsubishi HC4900 projector has H-Sync Range: 15.0 - 100.0kHz and V-Sync Range: 50 - 120Hz however I don't see 100Hz (nor 120Hz) as a refresh rate option in the Nvidia 8400GS display properties. Am I missing something here? Should I be able to set the Nvidia to 100Hz?

[bigflause]

there is a current issue with vista and missing resolutions and refresh rates. I was able to run 1080p at 50hz but it recently is has disappeared with newer drivers?? hopefully they will fix it soon.

[Lotsofjazz]

If the incoming SDTV signal is 50Hz, you should set your Nvidea output also at 50Hz. If the TV has the ability to increase the frame rate to 100Hz, you will see 100Hz at the display.. check your specs if your TV has 100Hz technology

What I meant is that some TV's have the ability to increase the 50Hz incoming signal to 100Hz, by interpolating 50% more frames. Setting the Nvidea refreshrate output to 100Hz has no influence, contrary, because then the TV incoming signal is 100Hz, the TV doesnt recognize a 50Hz TV signal and will not interpolate extra frames, so visually you still will see 50Hz frame rate. Note that this technology only works with TV signals (HDMI, DVI-D), and not with PC Monitor signals. So setting your TV as a PC-Monitor also will not help increase the TV signal frame rate.

Lots

[ba_baracus]

Thanks for the info, so is it not possible for the graphics card (or another app) to interpolate the 50hz signal to 50% more frame rates or must this be done at the TV level? Tonight I have installed powerstrip and even reduced the resolution to 720 * 576 (native SD format in the UK) and the picture still isn't any good. Maybe I am trying to get a picture quality that is unachievable but I would have thought that going down to the native SD resolution on both my TV (projector) and the PC I should at least see a good picture.

From what I have learnt so far (and there is lots to learn) and my current understanding is that if I have the PC set to 1920 * 1080 (50Hz) and the tv receives this signal then this is what it will output as the video card resolution settings will only allow you to select the TVs supported resolutions and refresh rates. OK, so therefore if a SD DVB-t signal is 720-576 then either the PC software (utilising the CPU), or the video card (utilising the GPU) or the external TV / display (utilising the onboard chip) will perform upscaling. I noticed especially that if I change the zoom in mediaportal to original the picture will show up in a very small area smaller than the external display area.

I set the video card resolution to 720 * 576 (50hz) tonight and found that when switching tv on in MP the whole TV screen area was not displayed onto. I am able to tell what resolution the TV outputs at any time via an information window that shows the signal it is receiving. Only if I change the video card resolution and refresh rate does the TV recognise this and switches to match it. Therefore, whatever the video card resolution and refresh rate is set to then this is what the TV outputs.

I havn't had chance to plug in my humax box in yet to compare on the HC4900 but the solution may be to ditch MP for watching SD TV if I see a major improvment over using my HTPC with mediaportal.

I may yet go back to FFDShow and try setting up some post processing for tv in MP to resize the SD signal from its original up to 1920 * 1080 and play some more as because of yet, neither my 8400GS or the TV (HC4900 projector) is capable of doing a half decent job from what I have tried.

[Squidmata]

Hello there.

To join in, I have pretty much exactly the same picture quality as you Bigflause (hi again).

I think the point is that these new TVs really show up the flaws that previously were hidden; I mean if you watch BBC HD, at times you'd think it was only about as good as an old-fashioned terrestrial aerial picture on a CRT; and as for the football, well that's like watching a stream sometimes. I think we may be stuck like this until the TV companies all switch to HD signals.

Having said that, I'm happy for someone to pop up with a fix for it right now...

Squid.

[bigflause]

Hi Squid

well I can confirm that upscaling the picture has not effect what so ever. I still get the same blocks at the lowest resolution my set can take. So I have put it right back up to 1080p. what I did find interesting was the my purevideo codecs didn't not work as well as the newest powerdvd one's. when I moved to them an watched the footy the picture was better and moved much quicker.

Now I did also re-install drivers and used guru3d's power sweeper to clean any thing up. re-installed all codecs.

But this was skysports I was watching and the screen shot was BBC. I think you both might be right about it being the signal that is being broadcast. I watched revista de la liga before the Liverpool game on Tuesday and the picture was terrible. (I know foreign matches look bad anyway) but as soon as the Liverpool game came on and sky where using there proper cameras. It was perfect??

I think we will always have these blocks because our graphics card is giving us the exact best picture it can and that original picture probably has those blocks in it. hopefully I'm wrong.

We don't have BBC HD over here in Ireland so I'm stuck with SD.

I connected my starview STB to my TV as well and the picture was shockingly bad. so I will have to cope until more HD comes my way.

[ba_baracus]

Well I managed to hook up my humax 9200t box up and that runs at 720 * 576i @ 25hz. Had a quick tinker and found that the picture seems a lot more smoother (no live football tonight though) and could see this via the skysports tickers. Set the resolution down on the htpc to match that of the STB and still not as smooth, however will need to test with live sport for more conclusive results. At the minute it would seem that the STB can provide a better pic than my HTPC.

[EViS]

Originally Posted by ba_baracus

I set the video card resolution to 720 * 576 (50hz) tonight and found that when switching tv on in MP the whole TV screen area was not displayed onto.

I have this same problem when not using ffdshow, which is why I am forced to using ffdshow's upscaling and not ATI's hardware... Have you managed to find a fix for this yet?