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View Full Version : My tests of VMR9 and other renderers


kallekill
30th April 2003, 10:05
I am using Reclock to get smooth playback of my movies on the TV, but I got a problem. The problem is that when there is a frame skip in the movie itself, like when there is bad Inverse Telecine, Reclock sometimes looses the video sync and the picture starts to stutter. I have found out that this is dependant on which decoder and renderer you use. If you use ffdshow instead of the divx 3.11 codec there is a greater chance that the picture starts to stutter. I made the quality tests with a clip from a scene that is dimly lit. divx and xvid have problems with these kinds of scenes and you can clearly see blocks moving on the walls in the background. I also tested it with an underwater scene that has light shining down into the water. The four renderers I have tested are:

Old renderer: This is the renderer Media Player 6.4 uses. It has good picture quality and uses the overlay settings on your video card. It is pretty good at handling stutters in movies.

Overlay Mixer: I couldn’t find any differences quality wise between Overlay Mixer and Old renderer, but it isn't as good at handling stutters in movies.

VMR7: This renderer was only accessible through Media Player Classic. It also uses the video cards overlay settings and has about the same quality as the two renderers above. I couldn't see a difference. It is also pretty good at handling stutters in movies, maybe not as good as old renderer.

VMR9: This renderer seems really good at handling stutters in movies. I haven't tried it that much yet, but it seems to handle stutters much better than the other renderers. The problem I have with this renderer is that the quality isn't that good. In the scene I was using to test the quality, the block on the wall was much more apparent. Instead of gradient smooth transitions of colors on objects, it was visible changes in colors. This isn't apparent in scenes in broad daylight, but in dimly lit scenes you can clearly see it. The underwater scene didn't look good with any of the renderers, but it looked horrible with VMR9. VMR9 doesn't use the Overlay settings so it is hard to change the brightness and contrast settings. The latest release of Zoomplayer has an option to change these settings that is a little buggy, but works. But I couldn't get the same picture quality as the other renderers even if I changed the brightness and contrast settings.

Has someone found out a way to improve the picture quality of the VMR9 renderer? I would really want to use it because it solves my problem with stuttering movies.

Blight
30th April 2003, 17:43
It depends on your display card... for nvidia, I recommend downgrading to the 30.82 drivers (although you'd lose color control).

What do you mean by ZP's buggy VMR9 color control... how is it exactly buggy?

kallekill
30th April 2003, 20:08
What do you mean depens on the display card? The quality of VMR9? I remember a long time ago when TNT1 was new and I had to swith drivers depending on if I wanted to watch a dvd or play a game. The dvd wasn't working with the latest drivers.

About the overlay control in zoomplayer. Sometimes when you hit the reset button it resets to very weird values that are out of the sliders reach.

It would be nice if zoomplayer detects if you are using another renderer than VMR9. As it is now I get grey picture if I choose the Overlay mixer and forget to uncheck color control interface. I have to hit reset to get it back to normal.

Also the color controls have no effect on a paused movie with VMR9. I have to play it for it it to change (I don't know if there is a way to make this happen, maybe it's something with VMR9).
No big problems.

Blight
1st May 2003, 09:46
The reset function resets to a user defined default (as each bloody card/driver has a different default settings).

I'll see if I can make color control work while paused.

VMR9 quality on the NVIDIA 43.45 drivers is bugged as hell. You either get a blurred image or aliased image, there's no way around it, it's a bug in the driver. The 30.82 driver seems ok, but it doesn't have the color support. So there's no perfect solution.