[e3henri]

General Android mediacodec. There is not much to think about that - use the onboard Android player and see the same issue.

Does that mean that disabling hw acceleration and decode in sw mode will get the picture problems solved?

[wesk05]

There is actually nothing wrong with the color space on SATV. There are some banding and sharpness issues, but those seem to be limited to test patterns that are made to make them apparent. Banding seems to happen only with lower bitrate videos. I have compared SATV, Google Nexus Player, Amazon FireTV 2, Apple TV4, Minix U1, Raspberry Pi2, x86 OpenELEC Kodi with VAAPI (Intel Haswell). I will post the frame captures tonight. You will see that the differences in picture quality are very subtle.

[danjames92]

There is actually nothing wrong with the color space on SATV. There are some banding and sharpness issues, but those seem to be limited to test patterns that are made to make them apparent. Banding seems to happen only with lower bitrate videos. I have compared SATV, Google Nexus Player, Amazon FireTV 2, Apple TV4, Minix U1, Raspberry Pi2, x86 OpenELEC Kodi with VAAPI (Intel Haswell). I will post the frame captures tonight. You will see that the differences in picture quality are very subtle.

Wrong. I see visible banding in The Pacific bluray rips.

[wesk05]

Wrong. I see visible banding in The Pacific bluray rips.

Well... if you send me a sample of the scene that shows banding, I will include that also in the comparison. I found it very hard to find a movie scene with visible banding from the original m2ts file of Blu-ray rip. I only need a 15 sec. clip. I capture the HDMI output as uncompressed RGB using a Blackmagicdesign DeckLink Extreme card and then open the captured video in Davinci Resolve to export a single frame in dpx format.

[datranquil]

It is for sure not only low bitrate media. I can also see this on live TV from sat which comes with very good bitrates. Never saw this with an pc.

[Tinwarble]

Just to update, ManuelG @nvidia just posted a response to the PQ issue.

Thank you for your feedback. Picture quality is very important to us and we’re currently working on enhancements.

Our next software update (3.0) will upgrade SHIELD to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The following update (3.1), and subsequent updates, will include enhancements for picture quality.

[datranquil]

The first post from nvidia to this topic ever. Finally. But honestly, 3.1? When should this be released? I don't think it is coming before summer, so we had to live with that quality as is now.

[querty1000]

The first post from nvidia to this topic ever. Finally. But honestly, 3.1? When should this be released? I don't think it is coming before summer, so we had to live with that quality as is now.

If you own some boxes that are never fixed nor in a workable state (open hour chameleon f.e.) you would calm down and wait for the updates :-)

[fritsch]

The first post from nvidia to this topic ever. Finally. But honestly, 3.1? When should this be released? I don't think it is coming before summer, so we had to live with that quality as is now.

If you own some boxes that are never fixed nor in a workable state (open hour chameleon f.e.) you would calm down and wait for the updates :-)

or sell the box and buy a new one in half a year :-)

[wesk05]

The picture quality isn't actually all that bad. It compares evenly with other popular devices including Linux/Kodi with VAAPI. I have done a comparison between 1) nVIDIA Shield 2) Google Nexus Player 3) Amazon Fire TV 2 4) Apple TV 4 5) Minix U1 6) Raspberry Pi 2 and 7) Intel Haswell 4570S HTPC running openELEC Kodi v17. All devices expect for Minix U1 was set to output RGB Limited color space. HDMI output from each device was captured as uncompressed RGB using a Blackmagicdesign DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G card. The captured videos were opened in Davinci Resolve and an exact frame was exported in DPX format which was later converted to PNG in Adobe Photoshop.

Here are the frame captures. I have assigned a random letter to each of the devices for each movie scene.

Gravity https://flic.kr/s/aHskpEWHR3
Inside Out https://flic.kr/s/aHsksYuyzq
Life of Pi https://flic.kr/s/aHsksmo2Fh
Samsara Clip1 https://flic.kr/s/aHsksaEAAt
Samsara Clip2 https://flic.kr/s/aHskpFPPDn
The Dark Knight Rises https://flic.kr/s/aHskpFQ1P8

It would be interesting to see how many can actually pick SATV out from this group.

[fritsch]

Gravity D stars are missing
Inside out A does not match the rest
Dark Knight: B something is wrong

Rest: No idea - I only checked with my laptop (most likely not good for this comparison anyways).

[wesk05]

Gravity D stars are missing
Inside out A does not match the rest
Dark Knight: B something is wrong

Rest: No idea - I only checked with my laptop (most likely not good for this comparison anyways).

You have provided random devices The good thing is none of those are the SATV! Inside Out A and G are very similar.

[fritsch]

Yeah - that's what I expected. One should not check such images on an old laptop display.

Btw. I think the first poster most likely uses a full rgb screen and a shield outputting Limited. Possible?

[wesk05]

Btw. I think the first poster most likely uses a full rgb screen and a shield outputting Limited. Possible?

I think most of the complaints are due to this issue. There are many lesser known brand TVs that only support full range in RGB mode.

[querty1000]

The first post from nvidia to this topic ever. Finally. But honestly, 3.1? When should this be released? I don't think it is coming before summer, so we had to live with that quality as is now.

If you own some boxes that are never fixed nor in a workable state (open hour chameleon f.e.) you would calm down and wait for the updates :-)

or sell the box and buy a new one in half a year :-)

If the Intel boxes could at least full frame 3D (OK, 4k/60 on HDMI would also be nice) no one would buy the android crap (pointing to the mentioned OHC).