madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[Niyawa]

Originally Posted by fairchild

I'm more of a fan of chroma with no AR. I keep going back to the Mid option (chroma: Bicubic75, upscaling: Lanczos3 AR) even though my system is fast enough to run the best settings (Jinc 3 AR). Also don't run FRC since I want as pure of a signal as possible. (hence no AR on chroma, which is perfect for Blu-ray, and AR on upscaling for non 1080p content).

Smooth motion is only activated (as soon as madshi fixes this) when you're running a video that's not optimal for that refresh rate anyway.

Originally Posted by Asmodian

Niyawa don't listen to fairchild, I really like your table.
But I am sure it isn't optimal for everyone, there is a reason we have all the options we do.

Haha, thanks. And you're right.

Originally Posted by Keiyakusha

Personally I use Jinc3taps AR for everything so I can't say about other options, but just wanted to comment on Smooth motion option.
I watch anime mostly (like 99% of everything that I watch offline and 95% of what I watch in general), where the difference between frames is often huge even if its not a scene change. And I find smooth motion to look very ugly. I can easily see where it occurs. However without it I can't tell the difference, can't tell that something wrong even if some frames get dropped due to video/display framerate mismatch or whatever.
Maybe I set up something wrong or something, but as I said for me everything looks fine even without this option, so I don't want to invest a time to check this. I just want you to check whatever this option really that useful before recommending it to someone, especially if its many people. Just because this option is there and some people in this thread use it, it doesn't means that it should be used by everyone.

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

I agree, smooth motion isn't something that should be directly tied to a quality level table, its quite separate from that (and doesn't eat all that much performance to matter), and more importantly, some people don't even see the 3:2 judder (like most people who have seen this most of their life on NTSC TVs), but maybe would see the extra blur and artifacts it adds.

I get a lot of times that smooth motion is still in test and such, so I don't plan to make that chart the "recommended" yet, this is also why I share it with everyone before I start putting it out there without any sort of discussion about it. A lot of people already reported to me having problems with smooth motion, but that's more with those that have an ordinary hardware. Also, there are other options that can affect smooth motion performance such as "use a separate device for presentation" and not so obvious the flush/backbuffer settings.

Going a little to what nev said, while it's not logically correct to put smooth motion as a "performance" table, for now I don't have any better option. Most people don't see the judder because they never saw without judder to begin with. I personally can't live without smooth motion now, it hurts just to watch a 24p video on YouTube.

Originally Posted by dbcooper

Niyawa, are the settings in your chart optimised specifically for Anime or for general viewing?

In my chart? For general. What me and most of the users were trying to achieve when I posted the first version of this, was accurate and sharp image while putting a scale for the performance needed for that. As far as I've watched with some of those settings, it looks extremely good in both anime and general viewing.

Oh yeah, forgot to put this together:



Minimum would be able to play Lowest and Low, Preferred for Mid and High, and Recommended for Highest. Now this one I'll use in my guide to give the readers some sort of reference to what they will be able to play or not. Of course, this is fairly accurate but not accurate enough to use as a shopping guide, so don't do that. If you all have any opinions on this as well I would gladly hear them.

[06_taro]

Originally Posted by Niyawa

Going a little to what nev said, while it's not logically correct to put smooth motion as a "performance" table, for now I don't have any better option. Most people don't see the judder because they never saw without judder to begin with. I personally can't live without smooth motion now, it hurts just to watch a 24p video on YouTube.

I believe in your table you would like to archive the best quality for the highest requirements, but smooth video is not always ( or even in most cases ) the best choice. madVR's smooth motion is a good balance between performance and quality, but to be frankly, not a perfect one.

People use many ways to fight against judder when showing video with different refresh rate from the display. Ideally the best one should be motion interpolation, with which the motion areas of the missing frames are compensated and looks as if they did exist. However, it is quite difficult to find a decent interpolation method which can run in real-time on most machine and is safe enough to always catch the correct motion so that there is no garbage resulted from failure in motion estimation. SVP is a good implementation, but still far from being always correct.

madVR's smooth motion does not even interpolate the missing motion, but is just a weighted blending if my interpretation is not wrong. Blending is just a trick to your eyes. By trick it means if you are not awared you can enjoy it, but if your eyes are sensitive enough to catch it, and if your mind can realise it ( or in other words, not well-trained to be cheated ), you will not have fun with the magic. And the trick is sometimes quite easy to be revealled by certain sort of contents. It is not artefacts free. So it really depends on the person, the video, and something related to the trick show. It deserves a try, but should not be recommanded to be always on for everyone whose hardwares can handle it, neither in a performance table nor in a quality table.

[Niyawa]

Originally Posted by 06_taro

I believe in your table you would like to archive the best quality for the highest requirements, but smooth video is not always ( or even in most cases ) the best choice. madVR's smooth motion is a good balance between performance and quality, but to be frankly, not a perfect one.

madshi mentioned that, he wants it to look closest to a content being watched in an equivalent refresh rate (like 24p on 24 Hz) but I don't believe it's perfect either.

Originally Posted by 06_taro

People use many ways to fight against judder when showing video with different refresh rate from the display. Ideally the best one should be motion interpolation, with which the motion areas of the missing frames are compensated and looks as if they did exist. However, it is quite difficult to find a decent interpolation method which can run in real-time on most machine and is safe enough to always catch the correct motion so that there is no garbage resulted from failure in motion estimation. SVP is a good implementation, but still far from being always correct.

SVP - if you don't mind my lack of words - is garbage for me. I tried it once but the quality was just awful and the performance not satisfactory either. Of course, there are plenty of reasons of why that happens, but I'm certainly not the only one against it. As a friend of mine said once, it just breaks video quality. With madVR smooth motion, quality loss is way less noticeable (some people didn't even notice the lost of sharpness).

Originally Posted by 06_taro

madVR's smooth motion does not even interpolate the missing motion, but is just a weighted blending if my interpretation is not wrong. Blending is just a trick to your eyes. By trick it means if you are not awared you can enjoy it, but if your eyes are sensitive enough to catch it, and if your mind can realise it ( or in other words, not well-trained to be cheated ), you will not have fun with the magic. And the trick is sometimes quite easy to be revealled by certain sort of contents. It is not artefacts free. So it really depends on the person, the video, and something related to the trick show. It deserves a try, but should not be recommanded to be always on for everyone whose hardwares can handle it, neither in a performance table nor in a quality table.

Smooth motion is just a trick that makes frames be presented in an different time than the original ones, IIRC. It doesn't add nor remove anything, just the way they are being shown that changes. And what you mentioned about it depending on the person and video, it's true. But I mentioned that in my guide as well. If you didn't miss my previous messages, I said that this chart is still in test stage and it doesn't look the way I want yet (with details about those things). I'm also not recommending it to be always "on", but for the option to be enabled whenever someone gets judder. I know it's misleading because it has "Yes" and "No" in it, but that's exactly where I'm working on.

[leeperry]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

There is two commonly used chroma subsampling positions for 4:2:0, the MPEG1 and MPEG2 way, the latter being used by most modern formats.

MPEG1:


MPEG2:


As you can see from these images, using the wrong position for upsampling can shift the chroma by half a pixel, which results in chroma bleeding over edges.
If in doubt, its usually safe to assume that madVR does it correctly, doubtful that EVR would even be able to distinguish between the two.

Oh yah, I forgot about this

@madshi: would that make sense to add an automatic filename tag that would use the MPEG1 alignment if the content is SD and the filename ends by .mpg/.m1v/.mpeg? And/or possibly ask ffdshow what kind of codec the file is using?

I've got quite a bunch of 360*288/720*576 MPEG1 files, are these properly aligned atm?

Originally Posted by fairchild

I keep going back to the Mid option (chroma: Bicubic75, upscaling: Lanczos3 AR) even though my system is fast enough to run the best settings (Jinc 3 AR)

Sounds good, I'll try! I just can't decide myself to pull the trigger on a 650Ti/660 when I know that its stock fan will be hell noisy and warranty will go bye-bye once my dead silent Zalman VF1000(modded with a 5V 120mm) will be installed....but yeah, Jinc3AR PQ is amazing

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by leeperry

@madshi: would that make sense to add an automatic filename tag that would use the MPEG1 alignment if the content is SD and the filename ends by .mpg/.m1v/.mpeg? And/or possibly ask ffdshow what kind of codec the file is using?

Use LAV Video, it'll tell madVR automatically about the right chroma position (but it only works if there is no ffdshow in between LAV or madVR, because ffdshow doesn't forward this information)

[e-t172]

Originally Posted by 06_taro

People use many ways to fight against judder when showing video with different refresh rate from the display. Ideally the best one should be motion interpolation, with which the motion areas of the missing frames are compensated and looks as if they did exist.

It's not the same goal. Smooth motion's purpose is to remove the stutter/judder that occurs *because* of frame rate/refresh rate mismatch between the source and the display. Motion interpolation's purpose is to make it look like the video has been shot at a high frame rate in the first place. These two approaches are very different. The first one is generally considered a noble goal, while the second one is much more debatable because it is a deliberate alteration of the original content.

[Dodgexander]

That's why when using madVRs smooth motion you can retain the film look, without making it look like a soap opera.

[Keiyakusha]

Originally Posted by e-t172

Motion interpolation's purpose is to make it look like the video has been shot at a high frame rate in the first place. These two approaches are very different.

Not at all. For some reason you assume that motion interpolation is something that should be applied to the whole thing. But you absolutely can have it between 2 frames in a set of 10 for example, or whatever else number (as long as you have more than 1 frame to work with, cause you can't track motion from still picture). In other words these things are not different at all, what is different is an approach, algorithm.
Edit: of course this is in theory, I have no idea what limitations exist in madvr.

Also I want to expand on my previous post. Many (if not say most) people have 60 frames as their monitor framerate.
Most of the anime is 24 frames per second. Obviously there should be judder due to framerate mismatch, BUT
Due to the nature of the content, that have kind of "juddery" motion to begin with, it is a lot harder to notice, than the blurred frames made by slow motion.

Originally Posted by Niyawa

I personally can't live without smooth motion now, it hurts just to watch a 24p video on YouTube

I don't see how this is related. I though your table will eventually be included in a guide, and guide is aimed for the people who watch anime. Youtube videos are blurry mess to begin with. It's may be true that smooth motion makes wonders with it.
But if you say you can't live without smooth motion while watching anime... well then I waste my time here, this is beyond my comprehension.

Originally Posted by Niyawa

I'm also not recommending it to be always "on", but for the option to be enabled whenever someone gets judder.

with 24fps anime on 60fps screen judder occurs pretty often. doesn't matters if its always on or when needed. That's why if your source is high quality bluray, not some blurry encode, you can see it perfectly. Yet I bet you can't see judder as easily. if the show is interesting and you follow the story - very hard to notice. Which isn't the case with smooth motion cause face of the character you are looking at appears blurred for a moment.

P.S.
Sorry i added some replies over time, just don't want to make multiple posts.

[e-t172]

Originally Posted by Keiyakusha

Not at all. For some reason you assume that motion interpolation is something that should be applied to the whole thing. But you absolutely can have it between 2 frames in a set of 10 for example, or whatever else number (as long as you have more than 1 frame to work with, cause you can't track motion from still picture). In other words these things are not different at all, what is different is an approach, algorithm.

I stand by what I said. Calculating a new frame by blending two adjacent frames, and calculating a new frame by motion interpolation, are two entirely different approaches. The former gets rid of refresh rate mismatch problems while being very close to the original content as far as the naked eye is concerned (I understand that this may not be the case with anime, but that's another issue). The latter achieves the same thing but heavily alters how we perceive motion in the process. If the goal is accuracy, then the former approach is vastly superior to the latter (again, with anime the results might be different).

[Niyawa]

Originally Posted by Keiyakusha

Also I want to expand on my previous post. Many (if not say most) people have 60 frames as their monitor framerate. Most of the anime is 24 frames per second. Obviously there should be judder due to framerate mismatch, BUT
Due to the nature of the content, that have kind of "juddery" motion to begin with, it is a lot harder to notice, than the blurred frames made by slow motion.

The problem here seems to be that you assume that everyone cares about that. For example, some people might want to disable smooth motion because they want the 5-10% sharpness that was lost back, but others might find it not much of a problem if they can reduce the judder with it. I've been saying this again and again: I've mentioned those downsides in my guide, I'm not recommending anything, the chart is just for reference. Either the user will want it or not, it will be up to their judgement.

Originally Posted by Keiyakusha

I don't see how this is related. I though your table will eventually be included in a guide, and guide is aimed for the people who watch anime. Youtube videos are blurry mess to begin with. It's may be true that smooth motion makes wonders with it. But if you say you can't live without smooth motion while watching anime... well then I waste my time here, this is beyond my comprehension.

That's why I said "personally" silly . I sometimes download videos from YouTube and I make a comparison between watching in MPC-HC and YouTube itself, you can see the results. Try watching JoJo ED with and without smooth motion, you'll understand.

Originally Posted by Keiyakusha

With 24fps anime on 60fps screen judder occurs pretty often. doesn't matters if its always on or when needed. That's why if your source is high quality bluray, not some blurry encode, you can see it perfectly. Yet I bet you can't see judder as easily. if the show is interesting and you follow the story - very hard to notice. Which isn't the case with smooth motion cause face of the character you are looking at appears blurred for a moment.

This goes back to what I said in the start of my post, you're still assuming that what bothers you, will bother others.

Originally Posted by e-t172

I stand by what I said. Calculating a new frame by blending two adjacent frames, and calculating a new frame by motion interpolation, are two entirely different approaches. The former gets rid of refresh rate mismatch problems while being very close to the original content as far as the naked eye is concerned (I understand that this may not be the case with anime, but that's another issue). The latter achieves the same thing but heavily alters how we perceive motion in the process. If the goal is accuracy, then the former approach is vastly superior to the latter (again, with anime the results might be different).

I stand by this as well. I've seen interpolation multiple times and I can't express how bad that is. Maybe I've never seen good interpolation as how some mention it, but smooth motion is definitely a different approach that gives - at least for me - much better and accurate results.

[dukey]

Smooth motion works a bit like blend deinterlace. Fine for some material, but for things like anime might be terrible.

[DragonQ]

Doesn't work well at all for slow-motion interlaced content either.

[Mangix]

I have smooth motion at the auto setting and for some reason, it activates when I use 75Hz with 25fps content as well as 72Hz with 24fps content but not 59.94Hz with 29.97 content. That is just downright strange. Is there any point to this when I switch between the appropriate refresh rates anyway?

[Niyawa]

Originally Posted by Mangix

I have smooth motion at the auto setting and for some reason, it activates when I use 75Hz with 25fps content as well as 72Hz with 24fps content but not 59.94Hz with 29.97 content. That is just downright strange. Is there any point to this when I switch between the appropriate refresh rates anyway?

That's a bug that was already mentioned a lot of times. I'm sure madshi has a fix for next update.

[ryrynz]

Originally Posted by dukey

Smooth motion works a bit like blend deinterlace. Fine for some material, but for things like anime might be terrible.

It's amazing for anime. I have yet to find content that it doesn't improve.

[pie1394]

Yesterday I posted one issue in MPC-BE thread about the garbaged window title bar text like the following screenshot.

Yet it has been confirmed that such issue only happens when madVR is used. It just works fine if the video mixer renderer is EVR-CP.

Something wrong between MPC-BE and madVR ?

[cyberbeing]

Originally Posted by ryrynz

It's amazing for anime. I have yet to find content that it doesn't improve.

I tend to agree.

I've experimented with SVPflow before, and while it was overall sharper than madVR's method in motion, all its different modes produced horrible artifacts on the hard lines of anime during panning scenes. Using madVR smooth motion, I haven't see any artifacts at all, with only a hint of added motion blur. Overall I'd say madVR's 'optimal timeline' 'vsync adaptive' smooth motion implementation is far superior and a poor comparison to normal frame rate conversion or deinterlacing blending.

[6233638]

Originally Posted by pie1394

Something wrong between MPC-BE and madVR ?

MPC-BE seems to have all sorts of problems with madVR/LAV Filters compared to MPC-HC.

[ryrynz]

Originally Posted by 6233638

MPC-BE seems to have all sorts of problems with madVR/LAV Filters compared to MPC-HC.

Really? 'cos I use nothing but MPC-BE with LAV and MadVR and I have had no issues. Perhaps a slight exaggeration there.

[Niyawa]

Originally Posted by 6233638

MPC-BE seems to have all sorts of problems with madVR/LAV Filters compared to MPC-HC.

Never witnessed that. A friend of mine said totally the opposite, that MPC-HC instead is the buggy one.