Kodi Community Forum

Not sure where is the best place to start this thread, but I thought the linux section is most suitable and applies to my setup.

While watching my mkv collections (1080p tv hdmi connection to my 9400 nvidia GPU,1080p mkv, 24fps , with bitrate 10 to 15MBits), I noticed that the picture is not as crisp as I was expecting especially when I compare it with the xbox 360 playing wmvhd through components.

The best description for what I am experiencing is some pixelation (not performance pixelation) on scenes with walls and the sky. For instance, there could be a scene with someone standing next to a wall, and the person looks crisp and detailed, but the wall looks very grainy.

I have read somewhere that the dvdplayer xbmc uses does not do any post processing.
I played with all the OSD settings and nothing changed.

Could this just be the mkv compression? Is there a setting to filter out the grain and maybe add some sharpness to the picture. (oh yeah one more note, animated movies look sharper)

So the picture looks nice but it's not close to the xbox 360 wmvhd feeding my tv with 1080i, I mean theoretically, my htpc-xbmc setup and 1080p mkv are much more advanced and should look much better.

Any recommendations?

why dont you try to play your 360 wmvhd on xbmc and compare, also you can always use external player

merphi Wrote:why dont you try to play your 360 wmvhd on xbmc and compare, also you can always use external player

This is exactly what I am going to try to do once I get back home.

I also wonder if the refresh rate has to do with the problem I am seeing (I don't want to call it a problem, just lack of crisp).
Can you guys explain to me what the auto refresh option does, because I noticed no difference if it is enabled or disabled, my display is 1920X1080p 60HZ, when in XBMC GUI the actual FPS is 60 the GUI looks crisp, however when I play a 24fps movie, the actual FPS drops to 24, I think this is normal, right? but why do I get the same behavior with or without the "auto refresh" option.


And I would like to know what do you guys think of your picture quality, especially on large screen > 50'' and playing 1080p mkv

Thanks

I play my archived bluray movies, stored as mkv, thru XBMC on my 52" 1080p set, and they look indistinguishable from the same movie played directly from the disc using a bluray player.

EXPERTS, I really want to fix this one last issue before I call XBMC the ultimate best future proof media center.

I found a thread on avsforum with pictures and it shows and describes exactly what I have been experiencing, please check this link

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthrea...st15277824

any switch i am missing in XBMC or xorg.conf? I know dvdplayer has no post processing, but is there a way I can trigger a denoise/sharpening on the driver level?

Again, I know that it is no the movie and I can get a better picture because the same file looks nicer on xbox360


any ideas, thanks

Make sure none of the upscaling or deinterlacing opitons are enabled. They'll be either in settings > video > player or the video settings from the OSD.

You might also want to take a hard look at the encoding on the MKV files. MKV is simply a container, there's no compression involved in creating a MKV file. The video IN the MKV file can be compressed in MANY different ways. If YOU didn't compress the video then chances are you don't know what was doen to it to potentially screw it up. My MKV files, that I create, look pretty darned nice with no fuzz - however they are DARKER than I'd like which I do attribute to XBMC.

Right now you are comparing apples to oranges. Play the SAME video on two different devices or with two different pieces of software and THEN you have a comparison. NOT playing two different videos and wondering why one looks different....

BLKMGK Wrote:Right now you are comparing apples to oranges. Play the SAME video on two different devices or with two different pieces of software and THEN you have a comparison. NOT playing two different videos and wondering why one looks different....

Re-read his comments. He said it is the same file.

althekiller all settings you mentioned are disabled
BLKMGK I compared different movies "mkv" and same wmvhd on both xbox360 and htpc, xbox 360 is just better, arghhhh

maybe i am asking for perfection and I should give up and live with this little background noise on some scenes. I installed windows on a second drive to dual boot and compare linux to XP.
Through xbmc i got the same results for both linux and windows, so looks like the nvidia driver performs the same for both OS ( i played with noise setting in the nvidia windows settings but didn't notice any difference)

I wish there is a way to blend/smooth/denoise these fuzzy/vibrant/dancing pixels appearing on some solid color background, again they are not that bad from 5 feet but I am sure they are somehow fixable .

People with > 50'' screen how is the quality when playing a good encoded 1080p mkv? do you see what I am describing? or is your picture crisp? mainly with the background.

I am ripping one of my blue ray movies to make sure that file quality is not a factor and I will update you with my results

FYI my screen is 1080p 60hz would this be a factor?

So it's not the same file that you're playing on both? It could just be the compression in the source.

jmarshall Actually I tried the same file

But honestly after lots of readings, testings and research I am gonna quit searching for perfectionism and I came up with the following conclusions:

- xbox 360 does indeed smooth the background vibration but I noticed that the overall picture is kinda better with XBMC, but again xbox360 is optimized, hardware and software to improve the picture quality, so I guess I won't compare it anymore

- I did play the stream file from a bluray backup "batman" and looked great with XBMC, maybe with little bit filters it will be indistinguishable from playing on my PS3 (again this is me and perfectionism)

- I went through the 20 MKVs I have, hopefully nobody gets offended by me downloading movies I noticed that some MKV looks way better than others, even when the bitrate is the same or higher, which was how I was measuring quality mkvs and I was wrong, so the dancing microblocks were more noticeable on ones and way less distinguishable on others, so I decided to research the different groups.
if you download, here is a tip CTRLHD, ESIR, EUREKA are the best, get their releases (hopefully I don't get yelled by moderator for advertising ) they look very good
As it has been said before, XBMC display your movies as it is CRAP IN = CRAP OUT

- So yeah it would be ideal if XBMC has some basic common post processing filters, maybe softening, denoise, etc... so users have the option to customize

I read somewhere that dev are trying to implement these filter, do you guys know if there is any progress? I am willing to use my programming skills to implements these features, but never played with opengl so I might need some directions to what classes are available and what are the native classes that need to be used.

Thanks for everyone who answered my concerns, I don't want you to waste more time on something that is not as bad as I thought, again thanks for the XBMC community for this wonderful product

I've started noticing this same phenomenon with x264-encoded video. When watching in XBMC, the color gradients (such as shadows) appear very blocky and blotchy. Every so often, it looks like the smudging "resets" and begins again. Watching the same file on the same machine with mplayer does not produce this phenomenon.

theophile Wrote:I've started noticing this same phenomenon with x264-encoded video. When watching in XBMC, the color gradients (such as shadows) appear very blocky and blotchy. Every so often, it looks like the smudging "resets" and begins again. Watching the same file on the same machine with mplayer does not produce this phenomenon.

Possibly related, is XBMC skipping de-blocking by default?

FYI http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/5553
I think this feature is critical especially that most of the XBMC users uses large displays which will magnify any imperfection from the source
Does anybody know how to increase priority? no work has been done on it.

danillll Wrote:Does anybody know how to increase priority? no work has been done on it.

I believe it to be at the discretion of the developers or the user base.