Picture quality issues - signal? hardware? scaling? codecs? (1 Viewer)

[velis]

Hmmm... Did you read my post at all or do you just randomly pick threads to hijack?

Heh, you know those dam forum users. Yapping around the forum like there's no tomorrow.
Did you know there are even contests held on who hijacks more threads? I was a winner last year

Jokes aside, glad you solved your problem. Though I can imagine why the result had no definition. Effectively you double blurred the image by upscaling first, downscaling later...

As for my problem, I reverted back to MS DTV-DVD for now. It's just too unreliable for me to run ffdshow as postprocessing right now. The only "real" solution would be to unban ffdshow so that it would be the only filter in the graph. I'm guessing if TsReader gurus can't do it, I don't stand much chance either

 

[MPM]

No, there as no downscaling... The original input as broadcasted is 720x576 (SD quallity, Wide Screen is a "flag" in Sweden), S-video transfers it as it is (720x576) to MP and MP scales up to 1920x1080. TV is set to "pixel-by-pixel" so it shows exactly what MP produced without any scaling.

 

[velis]

OK, sorry again for not reading the OP with attention.
I've just re-read it again and finally figured out how you have things set up.

Anyway: you can't use ffdshow for watching TV as it's banned in MP's Tsreader. The Tsreader explicitly checks for ffdshow and rejects it. The first next codec will be used if you set ffdshow in config, in your case MPC-MPEG2.

As for picture quality, it's a result of video renderer's scaling algorithms.
I have the same problems as you on my HTPC though I wouldn't say they are so bad. Picture looks great in "Original" scaling mode, but when scaled to full screen, it's all blurry and without definition.
I use ffdshow for watching movies and have it set to upscale the picture so movies play great for me.
For TV I'm currently using MS DTV-DVD codec which seems to give me the best results so far (also uses the HD 3300 I have on my 790GX MB).
Anyway, you can try using ffdshow as a postprocessing filter for TV and using its scaling algorithms to upscale the picture to full HD. It works for many, but didn't reliably work for me, so in the end I gave up. The instructions are further up this thread. You can choose whether you will use ffdshow's deinterlacer too.
In the end I threw out ffdshow because it seemed to degrade picture quality besides being a bit unreliable and CPU hungry as a postprocessing filter. The resulting picture looked like it only had 15bit colors and there were also visible anomalies like some kind of a grid every 16 pixels (a bit lighter colors).

Seems I didn't hijack the thread after all