[trippinbillies4]

Hi all, I'm new to XBMC. I've searched for an answer to my issue on here, but I'm coming up a little short.

I have installed XBMC on both my laptop running vista x64, and my 5 year old desktop running XP. Everything looks great on the laptop, the issue is with my desktop.

I have the desktop connected via VGA out to my 42" Pioneer plasma. I used Powerstrip to add a 1360x768 resolution to my desktop pc so I get a perfect image on the plasma. Whenever I have played AVI files through windows media player, everything has looked awesome.

The issue is that XBMC looks like a color setting may not be correct. The resolution itself seems to be ok, it matches up well, and if I bring up the pattern that allows you to stretch, it goes to the corners as it should.

However, it seems to color-band extremely bad, like it's running in 16-bit color or something. If I play a file in WMP, looks fine. Launch it through XBMC, and it goes to poo. The resolution is set to the 1360x768. Any ideas on what I could check?

[fanclub]

got latest drivers for your video card?

[trippinbillies4]

Goooood question. My guess is no, as I haven't used this desktop in forever (hooking it up to my control4 system now as a media player.) I'll get on that and let you know.

[nicholsonrl]

I am having the same problem on my recently installation of XBMC. Playback of video on Windows Media Player is fine, however, same video through XBMC has poor color quality. Any resolution out there? Thanks...

[VonMagnum]

I am having the same problem on my recently installation of XBMC. Playback of video on Windows Media Player is fine, however, same video through XBMC has poor color quality. Any resolution out there? Thanks...

I'm seeing the same problem on my AppleTV hacked to run XBMC and Boxee. Basically, there are all kinds of visual artifacts that look like "dithering" in 16-bit color going on in the background from blacks that aren't fully black to smoke that looks blocky and other visual disturbances. If I play the same video (if it's M4V) through AppleTV or any of the files through Boxee, the problem simply doesn't exist. They look normal on those programs. Boxee has its own problems, though. Movies in DTS seem to pause/skip every so often like it cannot keep up with the load. They seem to run smooth in XBMC, but then they look all 16-bit-like with artifacting.

I think the reason I don't see more complaints about the problem is that when I tried the same videos on XBMC on my Macbook Pro, there's no sign of the artifacts that seem to plague the AppleTV version, so clearly there's a platform specific nature to this problem or perhaps even something setup specific, although that seems unlikely since I used patchstick to put XBMC/Boxee on my ATV like most everyone else.

But I guess the problem is that if the developers can't see the problem on their setup, it's not likely to get fixed. I'm curious if all AppleTV setups have this problem, though. It's especially pronounced on partial black backgrounds (clouds of dark grey can often be seen), smoke effects (very blocky looking) and big patches of a single clolor (e.g. on the Universal logo of the Earth, the blue oceans tend ot have curved dithering bends).

[Skylinegtrv98]

If you like the way that Windows media player was playing your videos back...you could always use Windows media player as an external player instead of the internal player of XBMC...

Currently i am using XMBC to manage my movies and to make searching them easier, but all movie playback is through Media Player Classic

[jmarshall]

@VonMagnum. It's likely the <skiploopfilter> setting that's defaulted to try and speed things up a bit on appletv. You should be able to set it via advancedsettings.xml - you want it set to 0.

See the online manual for more info.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[moriaty]

@VonMagnum: same problem here on atv2. The dithering problem even occurs in main menu overlays, but becomes more obvious in darker scenes. I've made some pictures from the movie The Beaver (mkv x264 scene release) that is particulary bad:
Sample:
Zoomed:

The skiploopfilter setting as mentioned by jmarshall didn't do anything for me as far as I could see. Didn't fix above scene at least.

[CrystalP]

The Windows sub-forum is not the best place to ask for ATV help...