Your guide is ok in general but your ffdshow profiles for SD quality are giving you a horrible result.
The deblocking settings are way too high. This blurs the image and you loose a ton of detail. Just turn it on and off during playback and you'll see right away. Choose a scene where someone has a three day beard.
Deblocking is basically a choice for high compressed streams: actual see blocks or blur them away loosing any detail that might be left.
Also the Noise Reduction is way too agressive. Basically does nothing for you unless 70s like analog reception is what you have (think snow storm). Waste of processing power that doesn't do anything visible to the picture in the end. In fact with your deblocking there can't be any noise left as any detail is blurred away.
Turn if off as well and go for full screen resolution scaling instead of you 1.5 multiplier. Will give you a better result without loosing all the detail. Noise is not an issue these days. You just destroy film grain here and make blocky SD quality (especially TV) even more blocky with your setting. But as said, you already blurred anything away with the Postprocessing. So it does nothing for you anymore.
On the contrary you want to add some noise for SD (not DVDs!), especially for xvids to get rid of the blocky look. This is the better choice.
I recommend just going for scaling for anything lower 1080p and just a bit of sharpening. Not too much or you lose details and create artifacts.
Same settings for 720p as for SD. Don't do more for SD than you would do for 720p! Higher settings make things worse not better! You won't get more out of the picture. You will make it worse. If you go for different SD sharpening don't go too far. Just a notch more. Maybe even better not to sharpen 720p at all, the scaling should take care of it so that sharpening will not really help to improve the quality.
For stuff lower than normal SD resolutions (xvids and stuff) I recommend trying out to add some noise. So basically use your HD settings also for SD and for everything below SD (read xvids) try to add noise to make all the artifacts a bit less visible. But don't do much or you ruin it again.
But don't expect wonders. You can't polish a turd.
In fact scale and a bit of sharpening is all you should do in general. Try out if Luma or Chroma works better for you in general.
Good idea is to do the sharpening during scaling and not afterwards.
Better play with the scaling algorithms a bit for lower resolution what works nice on your CPU. You chose Spline/Bicubic. That's a decent choice and should not stress most CPUs. You will get some problems though with title sequences on interlaced material. Different story. The titles might jump up a few scanlines on the first frame they are visible before being on the correct position.
You never get SD content to near 720p quality. And all these xvids will never be DVD like.
On the other hand: calibrating your TV/projector to the correct color space will be a revelation!!!
Feels like 100% picture improvement. Turn off all the fancy picture enhancement stuff and instead calibrate it or let it get calibrated by someone (not possible with eyes). I do this for all my friends. They love me for it.
if you update your ffdshow settings I take a look at them if you like.
If you ask for mine: just scale everything to screen resolution. Bicubic in my case as this is what my CPU likes the most. Nothing else. Provides some improvement over what my onboard nvidia chip does.
The deblocking settings are way too high. This blurs the image and you loose a ton of detail. Just turn it on and off during playback and you'll see right away. Choose a scene where someone has a three day beard.
Deblocking is basically a choice for high compressed streams: actual see blocks or blur them away loosing any detail that might be left.
Also the Noise Reduction is way too agressive. Basically does nothing for you unless 70s like analog reception is what you have (think snow storm). Waste of processing power that doesn't do anything visible to the picture in the end. In fact with your deblocking there can't be any noise left as any detail is blurred away.
Turn if off as well and go for full screen resolution scaling instead of you 1.5 multiplier. Will give you a better result without loosing all the detail. Noise is not an issue these days. You just destroy film grain here and make blocky SD quality (especially TV) even more blocky with your setting. But as said, you already blurred anything away with the Postprocessing. So it does nothing for you anymore.
On the contrary you want to add some noise for SD (not DVDs!), especially for xvids to get rid of the blocky look. This is the better choice.
I recommend just going for scaling for anything lower 1080p and just a bit of sharpening. Not too much or you lose details and create artifacts.
Same settings for 720p as for SD. Don't do more for SD than you would do for 720p! Higher settings make things worse not better! You won't get more out of the picture. You will make it worse. If you go for different SD sharpening don't go too far. Just a notch more. Maybe even better not to sharpen 720p at all, the scaling should take care of it so that sharpening will not really help to improve the quality.
For stuff lower than normal SD resolutions (xvids and stuff) I recommend trying out to add some noise. So basically use your HD settings also for SD and for everything below SD (read xvids) try to add noise to make all the artifacts a bit less visible. But don't do much or you ruin it again.
But don't expect wonders. You can't polish a turd.
In fact scale and a bit of sharpening is all you should do in general. Try out if Luma or Chroma works better for you in general.
Good idea is to do the sharpening during scaling and not afterwards.
Better play with the scaling algorithms a bit for lower resolution what works nice on your CPU. You chose Spline/Bicubic. That's a decent choice and should not stress most CPUs. You will get some problems though with title sequences on interlaced material. Different story. The titles might jump up a few scanlines on the first frame they are visible before being on the correct position.
You never get SD content to near 720p quality. And all these xvids will never be DVD like.
On the other hand: calibrating your TV/projector to the correct color space will be a revelation!!!
Feels like 100% picture improvement. Turn off all the fancy picture enhancement stuff and instead calibrate it or let it get calibrated by someone (not possible with eyes). I do this for all my friends. They love me for it.
if you update your ffdshow settings I take a look at them if you like.
If you ask for mine: just scale everything to screen resolution. Bicubic in my case as this is what my CPU likes the most. Nothing else. Provides some improvement over what my onboard nvidia chip does.
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