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I'm trying to find the best OS to use with the DN2820FYKH NUC. So far Windows 7 gives me the best image quality on OTA channels as on that OS I can set both - deinterlacing and scaling to be done in hardware:
I set "Deinterlace video" to "Auto", "Deinterlace Method" to "DXVA-Best" and "Video Scaling Method" to "DXVA" - this gives me a much better picture quality than under OpenELEC where I'm limited to software bob deinterlacing and lanchos3-optimised scaling that eats a lot of CPU cycles. Are there other options besides Windows that will give me hardware deinterlacing and scaling on the NUC?
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Wow so it looks like Windows is it. I can set pretty much the entire video path to be done in hardware:
Decoding - DXVA2, Deinterlacing - DXVA Best, Scaling - DXVA, Rendering - DXVA-HD.
This gives me the best possible picture quality, especially on 1080i sport content such as football. I see no deinterlacing artifacts, the moving ball stays proper shape etc. and the picture is much sharper than the bob method in OpenELEC. The Celeron CPU stays at around 15%. I hope some day OpenELEC can catch up, but for now Windows is the best OS for best image quality in XBMC/KODI on the NUC.
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Can I ask: if you're not so worried about interlaced sources, is there any difference in picture quality? I'm in the process of putting together a second N2820/2830 NUC and I'm trying to decide what OS to put on it. I'm happy enough with OpenELEC on the one I have, but it's only ever used for watching kids movies and TV. The new one will be used for more wide-ranging viewing.
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The biggest win is definitively deinterlacing. The smaller win is advanced scaling in hardware. There is a small picture quality difference when upscaling DVD and other SD content that is already progressive. You can see the difference in diagonal lines for example which are much smoother when scaling is done in hardware. You can use the lanchos-3 optimized scaling method to get similar results but your frame rate may suffer due to the Celeron CPU being pegged by the software scaling algorithm.
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Okay, that's good info to know, thank you. I got a bit excited a few days ago and bought myself a 240GB SSD, which is certainly overkill for OpenELEC (!) so I probably should consider putting windows on there anyway. I've ordered 4GB of RAM too, which should just about be enough.
agreed.
