Best Directshow DV Decoder?

[IanD]

When playing back DV in XP with MPC, the standard "DV Decoder" (I assume MS-DV) seems to be used.

No matter what I do, I can't get the Cedocida codec to be used, probably because it is VFW.

Comments on various threads suggest the libavcodec implementation of a DV decoder in ffdshow is not the best quality.

Whilst the standard DV Decoder appears to filter out some noise, it also seems to be doing some kind of field blend deinterlacing and the overall result leaves a lot to be desired.

Therefore, is there a better Directshow DV decoder out there somewhere?

I would prefer not to process DV into a different codec that is better supported under Directshow, or to use Avisynth in real time to get better control of output.

[Midzuki]

No matter what I do, I can't get the Cedocida codec to be used, probably because it is VFW.

Please specify "no matter what you have done". :)
Have you "low-merited" / unregistered qdv.dll ?
Have you set MPC to NOT use Microsoft AVI splitter ??
Unless the OS settings have been severely screwed, DirectShow can be convinced/forced to use both VfW and ACM.

[bus_labi]

the standard "DV Decoder" (I assume MS-DV) seems to be used.


Which is easy to check by looking at Filters menu in MPC when playing the file


...Whilst the standard DV Decoder appears to filter out some noise, it also seems to be doing some kind of field blend deinterlacing and the overall result leaves a lot to be desired.


I would guess that it is not DV decoder that is deintrlacing/denoising - most likely graphic card.
If you happen to have ATI GPU open the Catalyst - there is checkbox "enable demo mode", "enhancements off" or something to that effect. This will turn off deinterlacing/denoising (until you close CCC).

Have you checked with Gspot or Graphstudio what filters are used to playback the video.

First start by setting merit for DV decoder to "do not use".

I would approach unregistering something with extreme caution (create restore point), because on my Win7 machine unregistering DV decoder unregistered also DV splitter and windows needs DV splitter to playback interleaved type-2 video. Unless you happen to have Haali splitter which does it as well.

Easy to botch and difficult to clean up as you can see by my own thread below :):):)

[kutjong]

I use ffdshow for decoding DV, which is far superior to the standard DV decoder. Also, ffdshow is directshow (duh!).
I then use my GPU for deinterlacing using vector adaptive method which gives very good results. :)

[IanD]

Please specify "no matter what you have done". :)
Have you "low-merited" / unregistered qdv.dll ?
Have you set MPC to NOT use Microsoft AVI splitter ??
Unless the OS settings have been severely screwed, DirectShow can be convinced/forced to use both VfW and ACM.

It was more a figure of speech.

I couldn't find a way to raise the merit of Cedocida to get it to be used instead of MS-DV and reducing the merit of MS-DV didn't seem to work either. I could only get either MS-DV or ffdshow to be used. I assumed (perhaps erroneously) that VFW couldn't be used by Directshow.

I forgot that my graphics card is set to IVTC, so perhaps that explains the deinterlacing and blending effect: the video is 24fps but the display is still 60Hz.

I'll follow all your suggestions, but I was wondering whether there was a better Directshow filter out there.