More FFDSHOW Questions ;-)

[Diginerd]

Well I have it working, and although I can't run everything I want on my CPU without it giving up the ghost (Any tips on improving ffdshow performance apart from not running stuff?!) it is doing a sterling job of cleaning up the most hideous analog cable signal and making it presentable.

So, this leads onto a couple of questions:-

1. What sort of performance are other people seeing with an Athlon XP 2800+ (Not over clocked). What are you favorite settings, and more importantly why?

2. What do you find are the things that give the biggest improvement to picture quality?

I have a 42" Panny ED Plasma accurately setup via VGA using powerstrip (I'll post my settings in another thread if anyone is interested, took about 2.5 Hours to get them 100% nailled).

My Preferred settings (Though unfortunately I can only run for about 5 secs before it locks with these are:-

Resize to 856 x480
Unsharp Mask at about 95% (Too much I know, but it really helps analog cable)
3d Denoise, HQ Croma & Luma times at default, time at about 7.5 secs.

Looks really good on my system.

Unfortunately I normally have to run it without the resize as it cause the aforementioned meltdown.

3. Leading on from this, is there a way to pre process my files offline so I can use a plain codec to play back, but all the scaling, denoising, and unsharping can be handled ofline by my file server?

4. And the most important one or me... Is there a way to hack at sage & ffdshow do you can have two sets of settings for ffdshow?

ie I would like all the super heavy processing for my PVR files, but I'd like to use ffdshow with just the image resize and maybe a touch of unsharping when playing back dvds inside sage.

I'm going to guess that it may be possible by installing two instances of ffdshow with different ids, but that's where I start to get seriously lost.

Finally I'd like to say thanks if you've made it this far, and the level of support I've had on this forum is rapidly heling to cement SageTV into my way of life. Can't say fairer than that!

[stanger89]

Originally posted by Diginerd
Well I have it working, and although I can't run everything I want on my CPU without it giving up the ghost (Any tips on improving ffdshow performance apart from not running stuff?!) it is doing a sterling job of cleaning up the most hideous analog cable signal and making it presentable.

So, this leads onto a couple of questions:-

1. What sort of performance are other people seeing with an Athlon XP 2800+ (Not over clocked). What are you favorite settings, and more importantly why?

The most I can pull off on my 2.4GHz P4 (533 bus w/ 333 Single channel memory) is Denoise3D+unsharp mask.

2. What do you find are the things that give the biggest improvement to picture quality?

It kind of depends, the sharpen (but only about 20-30) seems to be the biggest difference for me, but my cable is generally pretty clean.

I have a 42" Panny ED Plasma accurately setup via VGA using powerstrip (I'll post my settings in another thread if anyone is interested, took about 2.5 Hours to get them 100% nailled).

My Preferred settings (Though unfortunately I can only run for about 5 secs before it locks with these are:-

Resize to 856 x480
Unsharp Mask at about 95% (Too much I know, but it really helps analog cable)
3d Denoise, HQ Croma & Luma times at default, time at about 7.5 secs.

One comment I'll make is to not run resize, the files are already 720x480, I doubt resizing will make a difference on a 42" ED display, I know it doesn't on my 36" HD CRT.

Dropping resize will give you a lot more CPU to play with. If you're using the Warped resize, give the Dscaler Linear Correction filter a try, I believe it uses much less CPU than resize.

Looks really good on my system.

Unfortunately I normally have to run it without the resize as it cause the aforementioned meltdown.

3. Leading on from this, is there a way to pre process my files offline so I can use a plain codec to play back, but all the scaling, denoising, and unsharping can be handled ofline by my file server?

Not really, at least nothing automated.

4. And the most important one or me... Is there a way to hack at sage & ffdshow do you can have two sets of settings for ffdshow?

ie I would like all the super heavy processing for my PVR files, but I'd like to use ffdshow with just the image resize and maybe a touch of unsharping when playing back dvds inside sage.

I know there are ways to setup profiles in ffdshow (Image Settings) and that you can associate those with file extensions, but I've never tried it so I don't know if ffdshow can tell the difference between DVDs and MPEGs.

I'm going to guess that it may be possible by installing two instances of ffdshow with different ids, but that's where I start to get seriously lost.

Finally I'd like to say thanks if you've made it this far, and the level of support I've had on this forum is rapidly heling to cement SageTV into my way of life. Can't say fairer than that!