HD100 video quality issues with SD TV.

[Slipshod]

So..... Got the first R5000'd ViP211 hooked up, and have noticed two issues (on both TVs). Luckily, the wife hasn't noticed yet...

1. SD video doesn't seem to be getting de-interlaced at all. DVD plays back nice as smooth looking, HD video looks great, but any SD video has horrible combing in high-motion areas. It looks significantly worse than the normal ViP622 I still have hooked up (did an A:B compare). It's also the same on both of my HD TVs, one is a Sony SXRD XBR (1st gen) and the other is a Westinghouse LCD panel. Tried HDMI on both TVs, and component on the Westinghouse. Also tried live SVideo capture on a PVR-150 with no improvement, and have mucked with all the DRC settings in the Sony to tweak it's built-in deinterlacer with no success. I've also switched to 720P and 480P output res with no success on the Sony, and also 1080p on the westy.

2. "Native Output Res" doesn't appear to do a thing. I can display the current video resolution on the Sony, and it never changes from whatever the current output from the HD-100 is set to, no matter what material I play. I've tried DVD, .ts files from my HDV camcorder, R5000 SD, and R5000 HD.
I've also tried enabling and disabling the Native Res output to see if it affected issue#1 above, and it doesn't make a different. As far as I can see, this option does *nothing*.

Both Extenders are on the latest firmware (as of last night), and I'm running Sage 6.3.10 w/ SageMC 6.3.7a.

The first issue is killing me... Anybody else seeing this?

[autoboy]

Do you have all the supported resolutions set in your extender firmware setup? You have to make sure that you enable 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p if you can pass 1080p to the TV. With all the resolutions enabled, now you can switch between them in the setup menu for the extender and verify that they are working. Setting native switching should now work. That should allow you to verify that either, your TV, or your extender is doing a better job.

I use native output mode because I pass everything through my Onkyo 875 with an advanced HQV Reon scaler. It usually does a fantastic job deinterlacing but there are times that it does not work correctly. If you pause your show where there is a deinterlacing problem, you can go into the setup, change the output resolution to 480p, and start the show again. This bypasses the native switching mode and lets the extender deinterlace 480i to 480p. Sometimes this works better than my Onkyo, and most of the time it does not.

Also, you ARE running all connections directly through the TV? You don't have a receiver in the middle that could be screwing things up.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Do you have all the supported resolutions set in your extender firmware setup? You have to make sure that you enable 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p if you can pass 1080p to the TV. With all the resolutions enabled, now you can switch between them in the setup menu for the extender and verify that they are working. Setting native switching should now work. That should allow you to verify that either, your TV, or your extender is doing a better job.

480i is not enabled on either TV - the HDMI auto-detector didn't see it, and I wasn't sure it would work. I'll try it when I get home. I know I had it enabled when i tried component, but that was on the TV which doesn't explicitly tell me which signal type is coming in, and it also has a crappy scalar/deinterlacer.

Both Extenders go HDMI directly to the TV. With the Sony, I can bring up an info screen which tells me exactly what type of signal is coming in. I can use the vid-out button to cycle through all of the configured resolutions and see through the Sony's display that the signal type has indeed changed. When I set native output and played back DVDs or SD it still said 1080i. The DVDs looked nice and clean without jaggies, but the SD looked super jaggy in motion.

I use native output mode because I pass everything through my Onkyo 875 with an advanced HQV Reon scaler. It usually does a fantastic job deinterlacing but there are times that it does not work correctly. If you pause your show where there is a deinterlacing problem, you can go into the setup, change the output resolution to 480p, and start the show again. This bypasses the native switching mode and lets the extender deinterlace 480i to 480p. Sometimes this works better than my Onkyo, and most of the time it does not.

I'd like to use native mode on the Sony because the scaler in it is pretty decent. On the Westy I'd like the HD-100 to do the deinterlacing for me since I don't think the Westy deinterlaces, let alone does 3:2 pulldown. It doesn't look like it's doing ANY de-interlacing on the SD signal with either setting though, and the Sony isn't able to deinterlace the output at all.

I've tried playing the files back locally on a PC with VLC, and the video looks exactly the same if VLC is set to "none" for deinterlacing. If you turn on de-interlacing in VLC it looks MUCH better.

Wheeee... The joys of new technology. If it was easy everybody would do it .

[Slipshod]

Sooo... I think the de-interlacer in the Extender is having an intermittent issue with video sources. Film sources seem solid. Here's where I'm at:

1. Native Resolution works. My problem with that was that neither of my TVs do 480i over HDMI. I don't have a receiver with an HDMI scaler either, so direct-to-TV is my only option right now.
2. Component w/ native res on my Sony looks decent as far as the interlacing goes, it just doesn't work for everything else. Soft-looking menus and washed-out coloring compared to HDMI. It also has to resync with each resolution change which will drive my wife nuts.
3. DVD sources are always OK, even hard-set at 1080i on the Sony and 1080p on the Westy. The 3:2 pulldown and deinterlacing look great, I have *no* complaints whatsoever. It looks fantastic.
4. HD channels look great, MPEG2 or 4, on either TV set to native res or hard-set to 1080i or p. Tried both 720p and 1080i channels.
5. HDV home movies (Sony HDR-HC1 camcorder) look great on both TVs. 1080i source material, 1440x1080 res.

6. Every SD show I've seen looks awful, with dramatic combing. It looks like the deinterlacer is failing to detect the video cadence successfully most of the time, but not all of the time. Watching the Colbert Report I can see the video switching between "decent" quality (successful deinterlacing) and "awful" (no deinterlacing), though it's mostly in "awful" mode with only brief moments of clarity. The weird thing is that is will do it in the middle of a scene, not at an edit point. I'm used to lesser deinterlacers needing a moment to detect a new cadence, but that generally happens at a cut point in the editing, not in the middle of a scene.

[Slipshod]

Addendum - it varies by channel. Took a look at a small sampling of videos, watched each for several minutes. The problem ones show issues immediately

Problem Deinterlacing:
Noggin
Disney (e and W feeds)
Comedy Central
Food Network SD

Deinterlaces fine:
KQED (SF PBS local)

[autoboy]

Why do you have your Sony set to 1080i? Is it a 1080p TV or a 720p TV. If it is 720p, set it for 720p (768 set to 720p as well). The reason for this is that all your shows will be scaled to 1080i and then re-de-interlaced. Sorry, the Sony is known to have crap de-interlacing as well. 3:2 pulldown is only engaged if you ebable "Cinemotion" and even then it sucks and doesn't switch quickly if at all.\

Even my brand new high end Sony KDS60A3000 fails most of the 480i and 1080i tests.

I would go with component and recalibrate the TV to it. It is soft because you have not calibrated the TV for the component input. The extender uses a sigma designs chip that is simply a flag based deinterlacer so your shows are likely improperly flagged. Likely a result of your cable company compressing them improperly. I'm not sure there is anything else to do.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by autoboy

Why do you have your Sony set to 1080i? Is it a 1080p TV or a 720p TV. If it is 720p, set it for 720p (768 set to 720p as well). The reason for this is that all your shows will be scaled to 1080i and then re-de-interlaced. Sorry, the Sony is known to have crap de-interlacing as well. 3:2 pulldown is only engaged if you ebable "Cinemotion" and even then it sucks and doesn't switch quickly if at all.\

It's the original 60" XBR SXRD, so max input = 1080i and it'll scale/deinterlace to a 1080p display. Setting the output to 720p looks just as bad on the HD Extender. If I use the DishNetwork DVR the display is fine at 1080i or 720p, and we're using the exact same bitstream. The only difference at that point is the scaler chip in the Dish box vs. the HD extender.

I would go with component and recalibrate the TV to it. It is soft because you have not calibrated the TV for the component input. The extender uses a sigma designs chip that is simply a flag based deinterlacer so your shows are likely improperly flagged. Likely a result of your cable company compressing them improperly. I'm not sure there is anything else to do.

I did a basic calibration on the component input when I tried it (took it out of torch mode, set cinemotion, tweaked contrast, brightness, and sharpness, set color mode, adjusted noise filtering, etc...), and the menus in Sage were still noticeably softer. The video looked OK, but I didn't spend much time looking at it other than to check the de-interlacing performance.

I did some more experiments, and it varies by show, not just by channel: I've had different shows on the same channel have different behavior. It looks dead-on like the "Incorrect Progressive Flag" testcase at this URL:
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volum...ut-1-2003.html

[autoboy]

Yeah, I've seen the same problem. The HD extender is a flag based processor. The only way around this is to get a good video processor. The Sony does not qualify for that. The Dish box likely never goes into progressive mode. It may be purely video based and that is why you won't see it. Lots of cheap processors stick to Video mode only.

[Slipshod]

Update on this:

I've figured out the culprit, and think I have a manual work-around (works on some short clips I have). I'm in progress trying to automate the workaround so I don't have to do anything manual... Here's the details:

The SD bitstream from dish is flagged as progressive, but is actually interlaced. I've run a clip through tsMuxer to pull out the elementary streams, clear the progressive flags in the video stream with "Restream", and used tsMuxer to remux the streams into a transport stream. After copying both the original clip and the "fixed" clip to the server the improvement is dramatic. My wife noticed immediately - she hasn't been too happy with the drop in video quality since I put in Sage.

So.... I'm now going to have to learn enough of a scripting language (probably windows powershell) to automate the process. Restream seems to be GUI only, so I found another tool "pulldown.exe" which seems to work in a quick test, and is CLI based.

I haven't decided for sure how I'm going to have the script invoked automatically. Probably going to try and set it up as an auto-compress profile in SageMC first, or possibly use Dirmon to invoke it. Not sure which one will work better and have less of a chance for race conditions.

Cheers,
Slipshod

[matt91]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

I've run a clip through tsMuxer to pull out the elementary streams, clear the progressive flags in the video stream with "Restream", and used tsMuxer to remux the streams into a transport stream.

Out of curiosity, what's the processing time involved for this?

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by matt91

Out of curiosity, what's the processing time involved for this?

It's pretty darn quick. It's not doing any transcoding, so it is pretty much disk i/o bound.

[autoboy]

So you are changing the flag from film to video. I Imagine this would be fine with Video content, but what about with film content. Can you try it with a recorded movie and see if anything changes?

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by autoboy

So you are changing the flag from film to video. I Imagine this would be fine with Video content, but what about with film content. Can you try it with a recorded movie and see if anything changes?

Sure, I'll give it a try. If it is a problem then it's one more reason to try and make an automatic process that hooks into the auto-compress profiles. That way you could set it per-favorite.

Incidently, I'm having a heck of a time automating this. The GUI tool I used works great as far as keeping the audio sync'd, but all of the CLI tools I've used so far have issues with it. I just bought video-redo last night and will be playing around with their quick-stream fix to see if that helps. <sigh> I wish TSMuxer had CLI support for Demuxing that automatically creates the .meta profile for muxing the streams back together in sync. It's been very reliable de/muxing and keeping sync. 4 more days till I can post in the doom9.org thread and request it from the author... Friggin draconian posting rules on their forums.

[stanger89]

I forget, what was the problem with native output switching, 480i wasn't listed? You can use the output button to cycle through modes in setup to see which ones work, the detection doesn't always (never?) finds all the resolutions the display actually supports.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I forget, what was the problem with native output switching, 480i wasn't listed? You can use the output button to cycle through modes in setup to see which ones work, the detection doesn't always (never?) finds all the resolutions the display actually supports.

Both of my TVs don't do 480i over HDMI. When forced to they either blank (Westy) or go all green (Sony). So when native is on the HD100 still deinterlaces. I could use component on the Sony, but the screen does an ugly re-sync which takes a couple of seconds and makes the screen go all wonky. No way to make that pass muster with the wife.

I haven't tried to use component on the westy, but it's pretty much a plain monitor so I don't think it would do a decent job with it.

So.... I'm futzing with the streams until I decide whether or not to get the Geffen HQV scaler for $500. I also found that Video-ReDo's quickstream fix has resolved some intermittent "show doesn't always play" issues I've been having, so it's been a good experience anyway.

[jrockow]

Is there any update on this problem?
I just picked up the HD100 and get the same awful results with DISH SD.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by jrockow

Is there any update on this problem?
I just picked up the HD100 and get the same awful results with DISH SD.

Well, right now I just grin and bear it. The Geffen HQV box is on order, though I may cancel it because it looks like we're going to go with Dish's HD-Only package for a while to save some money...


Cheers,
Slipshod