VMR9 disadvantages

[THX-UltraII]

Are there any disadvantages about VMR9 when using this as renderer for .wmv and .mkv material?

[poisondeathray]

Higher CPU usage, faded colors

(I'm talking about VMR9 renderless)

You can check for yourself, just switch & compared a few renderers

[shaolin95]

Is the faded colors a 0-255 and 16-235 issue?

[Shinigami-Sama]

non mod-16 issues (funny line on the bottom)
faded colours
need to use mixer mode to mitigate these issues
its kinda slow

[CruNcher]

yep the mod-16 issues of VMR7 are the biggest problem, also VMR7 has no real quality Deinterlacing (though can be done in the Decoder) like VMR9 and can't use GPU Shaders to support it's playback (thoug can be done also via the Decoder) :( (also most Hardware Vendors don't care about VMR7 that much anymore and Prefer VMR9 and EVR).
The Price you Pay is not only Higher CPU needs also Higher Kernel Times compared to VMR7, but normal consumers shouldn't care and always prefer VMR9 :)
also VMR7 is restricted to the display refresh rate VMR9 can render above if necessary :)
The TV-PC Scale thing is no real problem you can change that either by most GFX drivers (options) or the Decoder these days :)
Im not sure why you see disadvantages in the Feature Set of VMR9 compared to the VMR7 renderer except maybe the little more System Resources VMR9 needs, thoug if you don't care about Hardware support @ all SKIP VMR7/9/EVR and use Haalis Renderer (it's one of the most SOA Software renderer).
VMR9/EVR though have the advantage to make use of the GPU features their Scaling and improvements and slowly they reach current Software Quality Rendering in Deinterlacing they can't already be beaten (Speed/Quality) and very soon Realtime Super resolution is coming Q1 2009 we will see first implementations of it running on the GPU (used since ages in Military Systems) :). So you don't need to care about SD/HD conversions anymore you do it Realtime @ Playback such things Haali won't (can't) offer :D