FFDShow tweaking

[BadLoser]

I keep reading about FFDshow being great for especially Anime, and I've been using it for quite some time now. Although I haven't changed a single setting yet. Normally I tweak my programs to death, but in FFDshow there's just too much to play around with, and considering I don't even know what most of the settings do, it makes it pretty hard. The number of combinations is endless..

So I'm hoping some of you guys can recommend me some general settings to use. Something that works good on normal anime TVrips and DVDrips. Hopefully something that doesn't need to be turned off when watching anything else.

How demanding it is doesn't really matter, my 2,5ghz Winchester will take care of it.

PS: I watch everything on a Panasonic 32" 100hz TV, connected via svideo to my X800vivo card, and running 1024x768 res. On the software side I'm using newest Zoomplayer and SSE2 FFDshow.

[Surco]

Hi

I watch my videos in a tft display, and they look really better if I do a software resize in ffdshow at the native screen resolution (if I understood correctly 1024x768 in your case).

I configure the resize to be a lanczos with sharpness at 0.60

Bye

[BadLoser]

Originally posted by Surco
Hi

I watch my videos in a tft display, and they look really better if I do a software resize in ffdshow at the native screen resolution (if I understood correctly 1024x768 in your case).

I configure the resize to be a lanczos with sharpness at 0.60

Bye

Thanks, I'll try that out when I get home from work.

Anyone else got any tips they want to share?

[Leak]

Originally posted by Surco
I configure the resize to be a lanczos with sharpness at 0.60

By the way - am I the only one getting faint horizontal lines in flat color areas when using Lanczos and Bicubic resize in ffdshow? It's hardly noticeable on a CRT, but it's obvious on a TFT... :(

Of course, this doesn't happen when using LanczosResize or BicubicResize in AviSynth, and disabling MMX/SSE code in ffdshow also doesn't change this.

[jon.schaffer]

@Leak

I never observed this (but I've got a CRT).
Could you grab a frame which shows this problem? (and maybe some of your settings, about aspect ratio mode...)

@BadLoser
you can - depending on your movies - use the post-processing (you can choose each step of the processing independantly: de-blocking, de-ringing). This may be good for low to medium quality rips, but it's a matter of taste. Default settings are good (you can enable "Accurate Deblocking" to get better color preservation with MPlayer method).
Using it after a LanczosResize is a good idea IMHO, because you can let the post-processing ON even with high quality encodings without too many detail loss.

[Didée]

Leak:

That's a bug indeed, and is present for ... dunno, a looong time. It was reported several times in the past.
(And the broken 'Avisynth' functionality ... was fixed in Milan's latest release, but again doesn't work for me in CDruid's builds, 4me at least. Darn, ffdshow is hard on the edge, complexity wise.)

[BadLoser]

Originally posted by jon.schaffer

@BadLoser
you can - depending on your movies - use the post-processing (you can choose each step of the processing independantly: de-blocking, de-ringing). This may be good for low to medium quality rips, but it's a matter of taste. Default settings are good (you can enable "Accurate Deblocking" to get better color preservation with MPlayer method).
Using it after a LanczosResize is a good idea IMHO, because you can let the post-processing ON even with high quality encodings without too many detail loss.

Thanks, Deblocking sounds great. Once again I will try it out once I'm done with work.

These two tweaks are pretty straightforward? Meaning that there's isn't many minor related settings that must be tweaked along with them?

[Surco]

Originally posted by Leak
By the way - am I the only one getting faint horizontal lines in flat color areas when using Lanczos and Bicubic resize in ffdshow? It's hardly noticeable on a CRT, but it's obvious on a TFT... :(

Of course, this doesn't happen when using LanczosResize or BicubicResize in AviSynth, and disabling MMX/SSE code in ffdshow also doesn't change this.

I have seen them, but didn't seems to appear anymore (maybe are video dependent, size, black magic...)

About deblocking, for my taste it destroys picture details too much, if used I use "mplayer Accurate deblocking" and _only_ deblocking (deringing kills all detail in the image).

When watching anime and if it's too blurry sometimes I use "sharpen/msharpen/hight quality" with an strength of 30 or so (but not so often because it aliases the image).

[Leak]

Originally posted by Surco
About deblocking, for my taste it destroys picture details too much, if used I use "mplayer Accurate deblocking" and _only_ deblocking (deringing kills all detail in the image).

I've noticed that when doing a quant 2 XviD encode with B-frames ffdshow will apply much stronger deblocking to the B-frames than to the P-frames, even though there's no need for it. Sure, B-frames have a quantizer of 4 in the default settings, but using the quant of the last P-frame in this case would look much better, not to mention the ever-changing blurriness... :(

np: Pan Sonic - Virtamuuntaja / Current-Transformer (Kesto (234.48:4) (Disc 2))

[BadLoser]

Regarding the resize, is it both Luma and Chroma sharpen that should be set to 0.60?

[Surco]

Originally posted by BadLoser
Regarding the resize, is it both Luma and Chroma sharpen that should be set to 0.60?

Yes, but maybe is better that you play with it a little because my tastes could not be yours ;)