[TheGremlin]

So last night I was ripping my dvds to my NAS box when I got to Avatar. I noticed that when I played the dvd with PowerDvD the colors really pop and there seems to be a more 3D'ish effect. This is particular noticeable when the camera pans in to the entrance of the big tree for the first time. In XBMC this effect is lost and the colors seem flat.

At first I thought it was the MKV (which is a raw copy from MakeMKV) but the same effect happened from the original disc too. I'll post some logs and screencaps tonight.

Anyone else notice this before?

[Malexx]

Thats why People are using DSPlayer builds or External Players,the XBMC Video Quality is a little "poor".

[bylokk]

I wonder what the current ranking in video quality might be, when you add Streaming Boxes, DVD-Players, Mediaportal, etc. to the list.

[TheGremlin]

Well, I kinda feel like I just got "pants'd" in a crowd...

I took a few screen shots and noticed the XBMC player actually has a sharper picture then PowerDVD, yet the PowerDVD certainly looked better in motion. PowerDVD seemed to over saturate the picture kinda like the tv's you seen in a showroom. This resulted in crushed blacks and I noticed a lot of artifacts on the still frame.

Come to find out PowerDVD doesn't automatically detect the presence of a GPU capable of hardware acceleration, instead it uses their "TrueTheater" effects. One of them over saturates the color spectrum (TrueTheater Lighting) which I'm not sure I like the idea of a program trying to "improve" my carefully tuned colors (remember the crushed blacks).

The other TrueTheater tech is Motion which apparently interpolates 24hz video to 60hz to match my computer's display. This gives me that silky smooth motion but introduces artifacts like a mad man. It also gives the soap opera effect which looks enterprisingly good in Avatar but ruins nearly every other movie for me.

Once I turn on hardware acceleration in PowerDVD TrueTheater gets disabled and the video quality is just as crisp as XBMC but alas no silky smooth display.

Guess there is only one thing to do, buy a 120hz TV that does true 5:5 pull down and turn off the AMP/motionflow/(insert lame motion processing technology here). Now if I only get this taste of foot out of my mouth...