Pixelated video - please help

[BetA13]

hy there,

a friend of mine wanted to try madvr and i was setting it up for him, but something is very odd...

when he plays videos in youtube for example the quality looks pretty normal, but when playing videos in an Player the picture looks bad..

we tried driver cleaning and new install of it, same with codecs.

he is on win 8.1 64bit
r9 290x
intel i7 47something...

we tried MpcHC, wmp, vlc, mediaplayer net.dot thingy and so on..even played around with teh amd driver settings that had to do with video settings. but no luck..

well, a picture says more than words, so heres an comparsion from him with WMP and mpchc+MadVR..
you can clearly see teh pixelation, its even worse in madvr, wich cant be right.

http://abload.de/thumb/970306testyfshs.jpg (http://abload.de/image.php?img=970306testyfshs.jpg)


and heres a picture from what it looks on my PC (nvidia). even the skin tone is different..
http://abload.de/thumb/asdasdasdasdasd74s7p.png (http://abload.de/image.php?img=asdasdasdasdasd74s7p.png)

so, theres clearly something very wrong..
and i tried everything, searched the net but i cant find anything related to this when searching like so:

pixelated video picture r9 290 or poor video player quality r9 290..

so, thats why i posted it here, since its the place of the Pro´s, i guess...hehe..

thanks for your time,
greetz....

[Ceremony]

amd has some shitty video filters that are turned on by default. turn them off and check the visual quality again.

P.S. I take it the resizing filters are not nearest neighbor, correct?

[BetA13]

umm, i have no clue what wmp uses as filter, in madvr we did use jinc, nnedi3 etc, none of teh lower ones..
and, did i mention we disabled teh amd driver stuff related to video quality... :)

greetz

[Halfpant.exe]

I am pretty sure you have something like 'finesharp' , 'adaptive sharpen' or 'lumasharp' turned on. just check the image enhancement and and upscale 'refinement tab'.

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk

[BetA13]

nope. and like i sayd, its not only with madvr, even with default renderer, or wmp, and so on, as you can see in the screenshot, even the wmp player has teh bad picture..

it must be a system thing i guess..

[vivan]

If you disable HW decoding ("none" for Hardware Decoder in LAV) then nothing in system should affect video playback.

It really looks like either bad file (different from yours) or broken decoding. Can you double check that he's playing the same file as you? And then try different LAV version.

[nevcairiel]

That sure looks like the post-processing "features" in the AMD driver are in fact not turned off.
Note that madVR will usually not be affected by them, as long as you do not use *anything* related to DXVA. No DXVA decoding, no DXVA scaling, no DXVA deinterlacing.

EVR on the other hand will always use the video processing from the driver, so in WMP or in MPC-HC set to EVR, your only choice is to disable them in the driver.

[wanezhiling]

You could disable NV12 output in LAV Video decoder, that will 100% get rid of the shitty video filters in driver.

[BetA13]

If you disable HW decoding ("none" for Hardware Decoder in LAV) then nothing in system should affect video playback.

It really looks like either bad file (different from yours) or broken decoding. Can you double check that he's playing the same file as you? And then try different LAV version.

jup, its the same exact file, an 4k video wich is great quality...

thanks for teh tip with the software decoder, im gonna check that tomorow if it makes any difference..


@nevcairiel

hmm, i was pretty shure i disabled everything video related in the amd driver.. But i will check this again tomorow..

the thing is, i cant just believe that this (wmp picture for example) is the Standart quality.. cant be, can it? i mean isnt there an quality control @ amd?

im on nvidia and i never had this problem.. even if i used teh ones in teh NV Driver...(and im NOT an NV fanboy at all)

dunno if its imortant, but he had an error about openCL when trying to use NNEDI3 in madvr, but that fixed itself when i suggestet to reinstall the driver with DisplayDriverUninstaller, so this is ok now.. but like i sayd, the pixelation is still there and shoudnt be, i never saw this, and i myself had an AMD Card some time ago, and i cant remember having such an issue... i hoped that someone here allready had this experience and would know something..

anyway, i will check back tomorow with the findings..

Thank you to all and have a good evening... ;)

[BetA13]

yay,

it does work now :)
Thanks for all your ideas and tips...

so, the amd stuff in the driver was OFF.
there where some resizing things enabled driver wise that i disabled, so the picture doesnt get streched.
now everything is as it should be :)

so, there are 2 things, ether the video source we used, was corrupted for him but not for me, cause in 720p and 1080p test videos we didnt noticed pixelation... or it was this resizing from amd driver panel..
Or maybe , i dont really know, but the r9 290x, does it have NATIVE 4k rendering? if NO, that also would maybe explain it...

anyway, thanks again...

greetz

[huhn]

all AMD cards have at best HDMI 1.4 and DP 1.2.

so UHD@60hz is only possible with DP

[BetA13]

he is using DP.. that i know, haha...
anyway problem solved..the quality is good now, or better as expected :)

also:
i just checked again and yes, its like i sayd, teh r9 290x does not have native 4k decoding..
u need cgn 1.2 for it..

info:
A GPU implementing Graphics Core Next 1.2 (Volcanic Islands) is found on the R9 285 (Tonga Pro) branded products.

A GPU implementing Graphics Core Next 1.1 (Sea Islands) is found on R7 260 (Bonaire), R7 260X (Bonaire XTX), R9 290 (Hawaii Pro), R9 290X (Hawaii XT), and R9 295X2 (Vesuvius) branded products.

With this newest generation of UVD, AMD is finally catching up to NVIDIA and Intel in H.264 decode capabilities. New to UVD is full support for 4K H.264 video, up to level 5.2 (4Kp60). AMD had previously intended to support 4K up to level 5.1 (4Kp30) on the previous version of UVD, but that never panned out and AMD ultimately disabled that feature. So as of GCN 1.2 hardware decoding of 4K is finally up and working, meaning AMD GPU equipped systems will no longer have to fall back to relatively expensive software decoding for 4K H.264 video.

On a performance basis this newest iteration of UVD is around 3x faster than the previous version. Using DXVA checker we benchmarked it as playing back a 1080p video at 331fps, or roughly 27x real-time. For 1080p decode it has enough processing power to decode multiple streams and then-some, but this kind of performance is necessary for the much higher requirements of 4K decoding.

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8460/67598.png

source:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-285-review/4


there you see, the r9 285 has native 4k, since its newer architekture...

hope that clears things up now..

greetz

wich clears up why 4k is running like shiat... ;)