[scumpuppy]

Hi all

had a look at XBMC today as a few friends have been using plex on mac.. liked the interface afetr installing it on vista ultimate but when I playback HD or Xvid media I notice the playback is nowhere near as crisp as it is on vista mce.. Ive got Vista mce playing content perfectly but this seems to need some tweaking..

Im assuming its not using the same codecs ive got it using in vista MCE, what do people recommend to do in order to get it playing content back perfectly? Everything is in sync and plays fine, its just nowhere near as crisp as vista MCE..

Can it be tweaked to uase Haali and FFDshow like MCE? had a snoop around the forum and cant really find anything to point me in the right direction, can anyone help?

[xanadu1979]

No, XBMC uses its built in codecs. You can't force it to use any other. You should have been able to find this info without much trouble.

[ashlar]

HD and Xvid are two very different medias. When you mention "crisp" I think about artificial sharpening added through post processing filters. Is that the case? Are your friends making heavy use of FFDSHOW?

In any case, search the forums for the External Player solution. That would allow you to use a regular Direct Show based player, giving you accesso to all the codecs and filters commonly used under Windows (including Haali Renderer, which should not matter a lot, considering that XBMC does bicubic resizing as well).

[topfs2]

HD and Xvid are two very different medias. When you mention "crisp" I think about artificial sharpening added through post processing filters. Is that the case? Are your friends making heavy use of FFDSHOW?

In any case, search the forums for the External Player solution. That would allow you to use a regular Direct Show based player, giving you accesso to all the codecs and filters commonly used under Windows (including Haali Renderer, which should not matter a lot, considering that XBMC does bicubic resizing as well).

Which is not enabled by default so it might be quite a good thing to try out as it should make abit of difference to the crispness.

In Video OSD you have accelerated Bicubic setting and in settings you have software, the first is better. (Yeah they should be merged in one we know )

EDIT: Welcome to the forums!

Cheers,
Tobias

[LaTropa64]

Which is not enabled by default so it might be quite a good thing to try out as it should make abit of difference to the crispness.

Why isn't that enabled by default? It seems High Quality Software Upscaling should be set to "Always Enabled" too, by default. Why wouldn't you want to upscale?

[SlaveUnit]

I would guess because some people like the scaler in their TV better?

[topfs2]

Why isn't that enabled by default? It seems High Quality Software Upscaling should be set to "Always Enabled" too, by default. Why wouldn't you want to upscale?

Mainly because we use accelerated scaler by default (the software one has alot more buggs concerning it, also it takes quite some CPU power) and bicubic scaling enforces the user to have opengl 2.0. We do want the users to have this but if bilinear is used its opengl 1.4 iirc.

Also IIRC bicubic was abit buggy on some cards hence the default being bilinear wich works on all. This is because the bicubic is IIRC GLSL shader whereas bilinear is available as both ARB and GLSL, and certain cards does not support GLSL shaders. (OpenGL devs please point out all my flaws in this explanation)

But ideally XBMC should automagically choose the one best qualified for the system and most of the times use bicubic.

Cheers,
Tobias

[LaTropa64]

I would guess because some people like the scaler in their TV better?

But how does the TV know to start upscaling if it's getting a 1920x1080 image from XBMC? It's not like the resolution changes to 480p when the videos start playing... or does it?

[LaTropa64]

Mainly because we use accelerated scaler by default (the software one has alot more buggs concerning it, also it takes quite some CPU power) and bicubic scaling enforces the user to have opengl 2.0. We do want the users to have this but if bilinear is used its opengl 1.4 iirc.

Also IIRC bicubic was abit buggy on some cards hence the default being bilinear wich works on all. This is because the bicubic is IIRC GLSL shader whereas bilinear is available as both ARB and GLSL, and certain cards does not support GLSL shaders. (OpenGL devs please point out all my flaws in this explanation)

But ideally XBMC should automagically choose the one best qualified for the system and most of the times use bicubic.

Cheers,
Tobias

That makes sense. Thanks.

So, if I'm understanding correctly, and assuming your system supports it... is the best options for those settings, this?

Render mode: Advanced shaders (GLSL)
High quality software upscaling: Always enabled
Upscaling method: Bicubic

When I left the render mode to autodetect, it would always just use Nearest Neighbor when playing videos.

[SlaveUnit]

A TV will always scale to its native resolution. When playing dvds in regular dvd players I have found some scaling chips look much better than others. So some I would leave up to the TV to upscale and others I have the upscaling on the dvd do it.

This was comparing a $50 philips to a $600 Sony ES series player.

[topfs2]

That makes sense. Thanks.

So, if I'm understanding correctly, and assuming your system supports it... is the best options for those settings, this?

Render mode: Advanced shaders (GLSL)
High quality software upscaling: Always enabled
Upscaling method: Bicubic

When I left the render mode to autodetect, it would always just use Nearest Neighbor when playing videos.

High quality software upscaling should be disabled
Upscaling should be choosen in OSD, move mouse when your in fullscreen movie