Best DVD software for HTPC

R

rcrez

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 22, 2005
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I compared the video from an upconverting DVD player (720p out) with simply fullscreening the video using WinDVD 6, running on a 2.6ghz p4 to a 2005FPW (20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050).

I've found that the upconverting player actually produced slightly better video than fullscreening it using WinDVD. The edges in WinDVD appear to be more grainy while they're more smoother on the upconverting player.

I was wondering if anyone knew of some software (and it must run real time) that would immediately playback DVD video in upconverting quality. I know there are some ways to 'clean' it up using by rencoding it, but I was looking for an 'upconverting WinDVD out there'.

Did I make any sesnse?
 
Not really, but the best duo for DVD playback is supposed to be ZoomPlayer with FFDShow and some good coded like the NV one. Search there's a ton of stuff about this. Or perhaps "upconverting" is something totally differnet and this info is useless, who knows.
 
ffdshow will do the upconverting for you. basically all the upconverting dvd player is doing is resizing the video instead of stretching it. ffdshow will do that on a pc.
 
Best software:
Interface- TheaterTek or Zoomplayer
Upconverting- FFDShow
Codec- NV MPEG2 codec
Rendering Method: VMR9 renderless

I also use Media Player Classic, I like a spare interface at times.
 
agreed with crime, if you want to upscale with a good pc use his ideas. ttek/cine both use nvidia's codecs. purevideo can also be used (nvidia's). you need to find a version of ffdshow that works well for you, setup the resolutions you want to upscale to (like 1280x720) and also set ffdshow effects (resizing and blur)

if you have troubles with playback, make sure to set the effects before resizing (such as sharpening/blur) which you will find out about after messing with the programs. theres lots of tweaking to do with zoomplayer but its worth it. i also find once ffdshow works well with zoom, it will work wonderful with wmp.
 
I would suggest Cyberlink PowerDVD 6 along with Matroska Pack....Matroska Pack inclueds FFD show.....
 
The best IQ I've seen is from TheaterTek using DXVA and Renderless VMR9 with 16x Anisotropic Filtering. FDDshow is a big resource hog and if you're using an Nvidia card with an LCD display there isn't much of a difference between IQ with FDDShow vs VMR9 renderless DXVA. FDDshow is nice for it's sharpening ability if you're using something like CRT TV or DLP though so you can artificially enhance the image. With an LCD the sharpening is just too much IMO.

One thing that sucks about TheaterTek though is that it's catered towards the HTPC purist so there are quirks like not being able to raise the volume above 0db because it will break the digital sound decoder for SPDIF systems over a reciever. So if you're like me and just using analog speakers or headphones the volume is extremely low and you have to raise windows volume up to 75% or higher just to hear anything. Thus causing everything else to be extremely loud. I spent $70 on the damn thing so I guess I'll just have to live with it for now...

Just read that you meantioned upconverting. TheaterTek by default uses a bicubic (I believe) upconverting method and looks 100x better than other players I've used. With FDDshow you have the option of using Lancoz upconverting which is said to give a better image quality than bicubic but I don't really notice any difference on my 2405FPW when movies play at 1920x1200, at that res FDDshow needs a lot of power. I'm not sure if even the most powerful PC's can play with FDDshow enhancements like sharpen, blur, Lancoz resize can play in addition to VMR9.

So IMO if you were using a CRT TV or DLP and had a powerful HTPC I would recommend FDDshow, if you have an Nvidia card and use an LCD I would recommend using DXVA, Nvidia Decoders and VMR9 like what TheaterTek offers. Takes much less power and looks just as good IMO. Quite a few of my DVDs look HD quality.
 
What's DXVA? I just got a 6800GT and I'm in search of a DVD playback solution on my 20" Widescreen LCD
 
Does ATI's DVD player allow you to use Videosoap? I forget right now, but I know the fileplayer lets you. I've seen some pretty nice stuff done through videosoap (especially for pixellated videos).
 
At this point I find it hard to recommend TheaterTek to people like me that are using it over their regular everyday PC with a badass LCD like the 2005 or 2405 because it seems to be made solely for HTPC systems. What I mean by that is that TheaterTek wants your PC to be devoted entirely to media playback.

For example; It's a hassle to have to raise the windows volume to 75% everytime you want to watch a DVD then have to remember to lower it again when you want to play a game or hop onto the internet. TheaterTek wants you to always have your volume high through your SPDIF reciever (SOL for people using anolog speakers or headphones). If they could somehow fix this and make it more accesable (read more convienent for people like me) then I would recommend it to everyone. As far as ease of use and IQ I haven't found a better player and I've tried them all... NVDVD, WMP + Nvidia Decoders, WinDVD, PowerDVD, Zoomplayer ect.
 
n64man120 said:
What's DXVA? I just got a 6800GT and I'm in search of a DVD playback solution on my 20" Widescreen LCD
Click to expand...
DXVA - DirectX Video Acceleration: DXVA is a DirectX 8.0 API that exposes a standardized group of MPEG2 decoding video routines that are in a graphics processor's video engine. This allows modern video cards to accelerate the most CPU intensive parts of the MPEG2 decoding process, leaving the lesser parts of the decoding pipeline to the CPU. This can also simply be called Hardware Acceleration. For HDTV use DXVA acceleration becomes critical as pure software decoding of HDTV streams requires a 3Ghz processor while only a ~2Ghz processor is needed with a fully DXVA compliant video card. Video cards that are DXVA compliant include the ATI Radeon family, the GeForce 4 MX and GeForce FX family and newer.
Click to expand...
http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2117
 
peacetilence said:
At this point I find it hard to recommend TheaterTek to people like me that are using it over their regular everyday PC with a badass LCD like the 2005 or 2405 because it seems to be made solely for HTPC systems. What I mean by that is that TheaterTek wants your PC to be devoted entirely to media playback.
Click to expand...
Which is typically why it's suggested for an HTPC, I use Media Player Classic on my PC.
 
CrimandEvil said:
Which is typically why it's suggested for an HTPC, I use Media Player Classic on my PC.
Click to expand...

The IQ difference between the two is quite noticable to me. I've even taken a few screenshots to show. Besides I wanted something easy to use and fast to configure for the best possible image quality, otherwise I would have went with Zoomplayer. I realized TT is catered towards pure HTPC use but it doesn't seem like it would that difficult to add a couple of features to make it work for both worlds. Besides, it would probably be good for their sales.

Anyways here's the screenshots for comparision. I'm using renderless VMR9 DXVA 16X AF in both (bicubic resizing in WMPC, too many options to try and configure when I just want to relax and watch a DVD and have good IQ from the start and not have to worry about setting 50 different things) TT uses Nvidia decoders which I'm sure add to the overall image quality, it is also much easier to configure color, contrast, brightness, and saturation in TT (a big deal to me)


Windows Media Classic Screenshot
Looks pixelated with less detail, just compare R2D2s red light in both screen caps, colors and saturation are off. Sorry it's nearly impossible to try and configure VMR9 colors in WMC dynamically in any practical amount of time. I also see no way of using pixel adaptive deinterlacing with WMC, something necessary with an LCD.

TheaterTek Screenshot
Looks more defined, no pixelation, colors and levels are nearly perfect because they're easy to configure thanks to TT's easy to use GUI.

(open as tabs in firefox to quickly switch between the two)
 
That is Media Player Classic, it's a nice program for free but its not up to snuff with TT IMO.
Regular Windows Media Player is just a joke, even when using the $20 Nvidia DVD decoders in combination.
 
I'm not really clear on how to interface Media Player Classic with ffdshow to get better results. I have both of them installed. I run MPC but where do I tell MPC to use the ffdshow encoder or whatever.

After that, what do I configure within ffdshow to get the upconverting results? I see a bunch of selections such as Deinterlacing/DScaler, Postprocessing, Picture properties, Sharpen that might hvae something to do with upconverting.

Can someone give me a brief rundown of using MPC with ffdshow?

Thanks.
 
I only use ZP + Dscaler5 + ffdshow and used one of those guides online to get some settings dialed in. Even at someone elses optimal settings, the IQ looked fantastic. Today i got around to using DVE to calibrate my own setup. I must say i made a TON of changes, most are drastic changes actually. It made a HUGE difference calibrating my own setup. It actually amazed me how "off" the original settings were. To anyone using ffdshow and doesnt have calibration tools, make sure you use Lancoz 2 and no higher. All the tutorials ive seen out there tell you to set lancoz to 10 or 4, but anything more than 2 really just adds more noise.
 
For my new all-in-one system I swore I was going to give Windows a serious shot - got TT, ffdshow... and ended up going back to linux with Xine. Maybe its because my lcd projector is just 1280x720, but image quality with Xine was much better, and the audio issues with TT was not fun - I did NOT want to spdif out to my 5.1 system and decode there for movies, but swap it to audio inputs for everything else. And with linux I can script the interface for much easier use (for example one menu item will go parse my /mm/movies directory and re-make my movies|xxxx submenu to include whatever I currently have ripped there in a nice format).

Of course it means I have to reboot the computer to work in Windows, but that's mainly for games... And I have already gone through the large learning curve with linux (and I'm a professional programmer) to be able to script the gui interface; also I'm not much of a PVR guy so my home theater is almost exclusively for movie viewing... but there is something amazingly satisfying to getting your system interface running the way you personally want to use the computer...

Just another perspective.
 
reillyp said:
For my new all-in-one system I swore I was going to give Windows a serious shot - got TT, ffdshow... and ended up going back to linux with Xine. Maybe its because my lcd projector is just 1280x720, but image quality with Xine was much better, and the audio issues with TT was not fun - I did NOT want to spdif out to my 5.1 system and decode there for movies, but swap it to audio inputs for everything else. And with linux I can script the interface for much easier use (for example one menu item will go parse my /mm/movies directory and re-make my movies|xxxx submenu to include whatever I currently have ripped there in a nice format).

Of course it means I have to reboot the computer to work in Windows, but that's mainly for games... And I have already gone through the large learning curve with linux (and I'm a professional programmer) to be able to script the gui interface; also I'm not much of a PVR guy so my home theater is almost exclusively for movie viewing... but there is something amazingly satisfying to getting your system interface running the way you personally want to use the computer...

Just another perspective.
Click to expand...


You should bring the audio issue up in the TT forums http://www.theatertek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7631 one audio thread of many. I've tried but it seems to fall of def ears. But so far TT has been the best solution for me overall even with the audio problem, I even bought an amp for my headphones just for stupid TT. I just wish I had waited to spend to $70 on it though since there seems to be so many different options out there. I just had to have quick and easy VMR9 + DXVA and the Nvidia decoders for pure video with my Geforce6 card. it's nice to know options for high quality dvd playback on linux exist though. I have put a lot of serious thought into switching to linux lately,. Can you recommend a good distro for a person that's never used it before?
 
There is some kind of audio upgrade available for TT (US$25), so maybe that's why audio sucks... :p

From what I have heard (especially from a DVR point of view) KnoppMyth is a good shot; it is a "live cd" (based on Knoppix - the grandaddy of live cds), so you just put it in your CD drive, reboot, if necessary tell BIOS to boot from CD before HD, and you are in the environment. If you need the internet (and you would for TV programming info, etc) then I'm sure you have to run a network setup app, but knowing Knoppix (which I HAVE tried) it should be painless.

This way you can check it out for quality, etc first without doing anything at all to your system. If you like it, I believe KnoppMyth has a "install to hard drive" kinda app so you can boot into it from the HD instead of using the CD.

A general (non-PVR-specific) distribution that has been getting lots of kudos for a while now is Ubuntu. It is based on Debian, which is a grandaddy of distributions. Knoppix, and thus KnoppMyth, are also based on Debian...

I personally use Gentoo, but I've been using it, or some variation of linux, for a couple of years now. The installation can be lengthy, but if you actually follow the directions step by step (which a lot of people seem to have trouble doing, given the number of posts into the Gentoo forums) I think it is a simple installation. However, that is just to get a base system installed; then you have to follow the Desktop Installation guide to install X and your preferred window manager (KDE or Gnome are popular) installed, etc. Getting to a full fledged configured system can be daunting for a newb.
 
Just to chime in about the linux distros....

Another - extremely simple install, with all of the possible desktop apps - is SimplyMEPIS.

Boot from CD and click "Install to Hard Drive" Icon. It's a Debian distro and it has a pretty large forum community.

Or for the GrandDaddy Distro - you can do the Red Hat Fedora thing. It will install all of the apps and 4 different desktops. It's not as easy as MEPIS in the setup/configuration but it has a HUGE community, and is kinda of corporate supported. Fedora is kinda like Red Hat's beta test community, whats in Fedora right now and works will end up in Red Hat's commercial products eventually. They guarentee upgrades every 6 months.

Biggest prob is getting a good download of the 4 CD's. I tried about 3 different times, then I got the DVD iso and it worked for me.

I'm still learning though....


 
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