Windows Media Player/FFDShow and PureVideo/FFDShow

Keetha

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
Messages
356
I was wondering why everyone strongly reccommends Zoom Player or the TheaterTek players over WMP? In WMP Classic, 10, and 11 (which are the three I use), there is the option to use FFDShow for filtering. Is there something wrong with their implementation?

Also, the PureVideo codec works nicely with nVidia cards to show better movie images. If I use FFDShow, there is absolutely no reason to use a high end nVidia card because all of the video features will be disbaled, right?

FFDShow has the option to upscale the video to whatever you want (3x, 1280x960, 1920x1080, etc.). If I don't use this option and go the path of PureVideo/7600GT, when I set a video to full screen, will it be properly upscaled to 1920x1080 for my TV?
 
as far as i knew, u couldnt use post processing on wmp10. whered u go change that in wmp10/mce? the less software i install on the machine the better.
 
Well, I'm at work now and my remote desktop stopped working for some reason after who knows how many months of it working fine, so I don't know. I can look it up later for wmp11 but not wmp10 because I upgraded. Either way, in both cases it was really easy. Basically go to options, look for "advanced" and BAM! there it is.
 
1.) Because Zoomplayer and TheaterTek give you a lot of options as to how video should be displayed while WMP doesn't (it's pretty simple/limited), ZP/TTK were designed to be used as an HTPC app so they're have more HTPC oriented config options.

2.) Pretty much.

3.) If you set your resolution to 1920x1080 and playback a video at full screen the video card will resample the video and upscale it to meet your native resolution (1920x1080 in this example) just like FFDShow will. The problem here is that this is a simple way of doing upscale not like how FFDShow does it, all the video card is doing is processing and redrawing the video at your native resolution. FDDShow will also do some post processing of the video feed to clean it up and make it look a bit better at this higher resolution.

A simple way to explain it is open a 640x480 picture in Photoshop and resize to it 1280x1024, it's not going to look all that great is it? So you'll want to clean up the image alittle by applying some filtering to and sharpening here and there etc.
 
Thanks alot CrimandEvil, you're super helpful as always.
Is there a way to integrate ZP/TTK into MCE? I really like the MCE interface and don't really wanna screw around with sage/myth (whichever one is for windows lol). I know you can integrate WMP Classic using the My Videos thing and a plugin, and then you can use FFDShow, but I wanna know what else I can do. The worst part about this is, I might not even end up using FFDShow because I still haven't been able to get any kind of good results with it myself, nor do I want to be constantly tweaking it.
 
Well you'll spent some time tweaking FFDShow (I spent a weekend first getting FFDShow setup to the way I like it) and then alittle more time setting up the DVD app (Zoomplayer has a ton of options and can feel overwhelming at first, TTK is pretty simple and straight forward) but yes there is a way to launch one from within MCE. You'll need the MCE plugin "My Movies" which gives you the option to launch TTK instead of the MCE DVD player and from what I understand it can also launch ZP too if you edit it's config file.
 
Ok. What I am noticing now... I am using the settings in the SS towards the bottom of this page, http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=17427
I've also tired others with minor varying changes. I think the biggest reason I think FFDShow doesn't work for me is that my source is utter crap. From my experiences, 1 hour TV shows (45 mins) are about 350mb or so. All of my Lost/Prison Break/Invasion/Etc. are about this size. But currently I only watch some X-files shows I got. They are only 125-140mb. When I use FFDShow, it makes the crap look even *worse*. I tried it with some episodes of lost, and it works. I can see the hair on people's beards better and see wrinkles and other things better. BUT, I notice around the edges of objects (people, mountain ranges, trees) some kind of... blurring? Like maybe some micro scribble or something... And then I realized, in all of the Matrix shots in that link I just posted, the blurring is there in every single shot. So yes, every single shot looks "sharper" (I think that's the word for what I am seeing) but when we get this new sharpness, it also introduces these edge blurs. Does anyone else see it? Why is it never talked about?
 
Looks like theres alittle bit of noise added due to slight over sharpening, just lower the sharping and it should be okay.
 
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