Any difference with antialiasing / anisotropic filtering (2 Viewers)

[Beer Hunter]

Does anyone notice ant difference within MP when playing with antialiasing / anisotropic filtering?

Kev.

 

[Beer Hunter]

I guess not then

As the application runs through directx, I'd thought that changing video settings would make some difference. Tried playing about, but I really cant see much difference.

Kev.

 

[knutinh]

I thought that these parameters only affected the 3D rendering processing, not simple 2D video rendering.

-k

 

[Beer Hunter]

So did I, but when setting antialiasing and anisotropic filtering up as high as they go, I get stuttering and loss of lip-sync when watching TV.

To remove all the stuttering etc, I've had to remove all anisotropic filtering and set antialiasing down to 2X. Unfortunately this results in terrible artefacts in the EPG with a white moving "line" appearing from the top left of the screen down to the top on the program details at the bottom of the screen. The text quality in the EPG is also reduced significantly. Weird!

Are the semi-transparent information boxes (while you watch TV / DVD) classed as a 3D object? How about the EPG, are these 3D?

All this is with the current, reasonably high spec machine:

MediaPortal Version: 0.2.2.0 (2006-12-21)
MediaPortal Skin: BlueTwo wide
Windows Version: Windows XP (SP2)
.NET CLR Version: 2.0.50727
DirectX Version: 4.09.00.0904 (9.0c)
Audio Codec: InterVideo Audio Decoder
Video Codec: NVIDIA Video Decoder
CPU Type: Intel Core2 - 6700 @ 2.66GHz
Memory: 2 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHz (2X1GB)
Motherboard: Foxconn 965X7AA-8EKRS2H
TV Card Model: Hauppauge Nova-USB2-T + Hauppauge Nova T 500 Dual Tuner
TV Card Type: DVB-T + Dual DVB-T
TV Card Driver: 1.14.24313.0
Video Card Model: Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT (256 MB)
Video Card Driver: 6.14.10.9371
Video Card Resolution: 1280x720 (1 monitor (DVI-D) + 1 HD projector (HDMI))
Video Render Type: VMR9
Audio Card Model: Creative X-Fi Audio Processor (WDM)
Audio Card Driver: 5.12.6.1186

Kev.

 

[Beer Hunter]

So no one has noticed any difference when playing with 3D settings then?

Kev.

 

[bigj]

AFAIK, MP when using VMR9 is using DX9 to render a texture/quad - so I'd expect any forced settings like anisotropic/antialiasing to have an effect, whether it's of benefit is less likely. I would NOT expect anisotropic to have much effect since this only really improves textures that are rotated w.r.t. the viewing plane - i.e. floors/walls in a FPS. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

I don't think antialising will get you much for video quality since most is scaled up to fit MP resolution (perhaps higher quality tex filtering like bicubic would though don't know if consumer cards offer this yet?). It might help to antialias the GUI though.

One thing that interests me is creating native *accelerated* DX9 postprocess filters for MP. It should be easy to create colour curve (gamma/contrast/brightness) filters. Also, it would be fun to set up something like resizing filters with pixel shader kernel filtering - lanczos etc. I tried the FFDSHOW resizex2 as a sharpener and it was really good but just too slow 'cos it's done in software (also forces decoder out of DXVA mode). I'd hope - though concede that this might not be true - that creating a DX9 filter at the point of rendering the VMR9 image would keep the pipeline accelerated. Does anyone familiar with VMR9 know if this is doable?

Cheers,
BigJ.

 

[bigj]

OK -I just did a search and found this demo here:
http://www2.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-9700-VideoShader-Demo-v1.2.exe

it segfaults when I run it, but the included docs do let me know that it is all doable.

 

[CHli]

it runs very well here on an ati x800 pro, very funny

 

[bigj]

Yep - i forgot I moved my 9700pro to the htpc - doh.
Yes it worked on the htpc.
Interesting isn't it.

 

[mPod]

As MP's GUI is D3D (all elements are D3D), those settings might affect the "beauty" of the GUI rendering. Video won't be affected by this, for that you have the deinterlacer settings in your codecs.