madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[STaRGaZeR]

The renderer is just amazing. List of things to improve to make it perfect for me:

- Improve windowed - fullscreen change if possible. Now it takes too much time and the image does some weirdness that's ugly to see.
- Improve load time. It's not that slow but if it can be improved...
- Support for MPC-HC shaders or similar.
- Output options ala ffdshow (levels, 601vs709, etc.)
- Stats ala MPC-HC

[Mark_A_W]

This renderer raises a dilemma...

Do we use:

- MadVR

or

- MPC HC with EVR Custom with Beliyaal's tweaks for smoothness?

I hope this gets "united" with MPC HC, getting all the tweaks that EVR Custom is getting - and eventually replaces EVR Custom as preferred/tweaked renderer in MPC HC.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by DeepBeepMeep

I am not sure I have understood its added value compared to VMR9/EVR for a typical usage, I mean is there any real benefit to use this renderer if no resize is needed for the playback of a 1080p movie on an 1080p screen using HDMI 1.0?

Well, even if you don't have to resize, you still get best in class chroma upsampling, a full 16bit processing queue with all its benefits for image quality and best in class YCbCr -> RGB conversion with included gamut & gamma correction. Finally, due to the way madVR works, all the damaging video processing algorithms which graphics card manufacturers like to use, are disabled.

Originally Posted by DeepBeepMeep

On a side note I have noticed that when a player that uses the renderer (in my case zoomplayer) is in the background the CPU usage rises to 50% even in pause mode.

This does not happen with MPC HC for me. Seems to be a ZoomPlayer specific problem?

Originally Posted by honai

One question: Does madVR actually support 10-bit data paths in GPU drivers?

Actual processing is done in 32bit floating point (that's the native processing bitdepth of GPU shaders), but temp buffers used for storing processing results can be either 16bit or 10bit, depending on the madVR settings. Final RGB output bitdepth at this time is always dithered down 8bit, but the down dithering is only done in the very last step. I'm planning to add support for 10bit and 16bit output modes once Windows 7 arrives. The 10bit/16bit switch in the madVR settings only applies to the temp buffers.

Originally Posted by jmone

Is there a list of what apps work with this renderer so far? I'm particulary intereted if anyone has it working with:
- JR Media Center
- Arcsoft TMT V3

Seemingly: MPC HC (special build), ZoomPlayer and ReClock.

You'll have to ask the JR Media Center and ArcSoft guys about madVR support. Not sure if there's any chance with ArcSoft because they may need to use protected data paths for copy protected material, which madVR doesn't support.

Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR

- Improve windowed - fullscreen change if possible. Now it takes too much time and the image does some weirdness that's ugly to see.

Can you describe that weirdness for me? Is there some visible corruption? Or is the image just squeezed for a short time?

Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR

- Improve load time. It's not that slow but if it can be improved...

I'm not sure if it can be improved much. Reading a 96MB file does take its time.

Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR

- Support for MPC-HC shaders or similar.

That will require a combined effort on my side and MPC-HC side, but it should be possible to do. One problem is that I think the best place for some shaders would be in YCbCr space and madVR could offer that to custom shaders, while VMR/EVR can not. So MPC-HC currently does not support YCbCr shaders.

BTW, forgot to mention: Subtitle rendering is currently not supported. That needs to be added, too.

Originally Posted by STaRGaZeR

- Output options ala ffdshow (levels, 601vs709, etc.)
- Stats ala MPC-HC

That's already planned.

Originally Posted by Mark_A_W

I hope this gets "united" with MPC HC, getting all the tweaks that EVR Custom is getting - and eventually replaces EVR Custom as preferred/tweaked renderer in MPC HC.

madVR getting united with MPC HC is not in the cards, because I want madVR to be media player independent. You know, although personally I'm using MPC HC for now, some people prefer ZoomPlayer.

But as explained in the first few posts of this thread, I'm planning to work on motion smoothness.

--------------------

Can I get some specific feedback, please? I'm especially interested in playback smoothness? Do you guys get stuttering with madVR? Or is your graphics card fast enough? How smooth or non-smooth is motion display for you currently? Especially if you set display refresh rate to 1:1 match with the source frame rate? Are the Beliyaal special builds a lot smoother for you, or only slightly so? Thanks!

[jmone]

You'll have to ask the JR Media Center and ArcSoft guys about madVR support. Not sure if there's any chance with ArcSoft because they may need to use protected data paths for copy protected material, which madVR doesn't support.

I've asked the JR Media Center guys - will advise of the response.

??? on the Arcsoft stuff....

[madshi]

Originally Posted by jmone

??? on the Arcsoft stuff....

Well, you can ask the ArcSoft guys, too. Maybe they'll add support for it. The problem I see is that ArcSoft can play Blu-Rays and they have an official license for that. Consequently they are forced to protect the Blu-Ray content from being copied. Which means that they can't just use any renderer. After all, madVR could have a hidden feature (it does not) that secretly stores the Blu-Ray video stream to harddisk!

[Thunderbolt8]

looks great, must test it in the next days.

could you please also add comparison pics to the haali renderer? I guess that its used by many people as their standard renderer (at least for me ) thats why I'd like how your renderer compares to it. thanks!

btw. I also like that it displays comparable good quality when downscaling, since I can watch 1080p stuff only on 720p screen here

[wozio]

Originally Posted by madshi

chroma upsampling comparison:



A picture says more than 1000 words. I don't think I have to comment this, do I?

What was input color space when using VMR9. I never seens such horrible VMR9/EVR output. Did you use YV12 or YUY2? If yes then it is very unfair comparision since on ATI NV12 is color space of choice. It produces very good results near that bad as on your screenshots.

I will check at home later today how it is going on my system.

Regards
Piotr

[Hypernova]

I tried it and would like to give some feedback. I am no expert or even understand what stuttering is though.

First, the installer bat file does not work here. I have to manually register it.
Second, the output color is certainly different from EVR CP and everything else. I think madVR is wrong though, it kinda "washed out". Output level should be correct though. I tried the TV Level test clip and madVR is certainly not wrong. Or madVR is the only correct one here and all other renderer give me the same wrong so I never notice? I am not sure on that part.
Thrid, I didn't try all scaling method, but Lanczos and Spline both crash.
Finally, it certainly does not smooth. Compare to, say, EVR CP or mplayer.

Well, that's all. I'm on Windows 7 Beta 7000. ATi HD2600 with Catalysis 9.2

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

could you please also add comparison pics to the haali renderer? I guess that its used by many people as their standard renderer (at least for me ) thats why I'd like how your renderer compares to it.

Argh, another one added. Please use F5 to refresh.

Originally Posted by wozio

What was input color space when using VMR9. I never seens such horrible VMR9/EVR output. Did you use YV12 or YUY2? If yes then it is very unfair comparision since on ATI NV12 is color space of choice. It produces very good results near that bad as on your screenshots.

I've used the standard which many decoders output by default, which is YV12. I don't think it's unfair. I didn't even know that ATI produces better results with NV12. And if even I didn't know that how do you think an average HTPC user will know that? Still, I'll look into how ATI compares with NV12...

Originally Posted by Hypernova

First, the installer bat file does not work here. I have to manually register it.

Hmmm... Did you run the batch with admin rights?

Originally Posted by Hypernova

Second, the output color is certainly different from EVR CP and everything else. I think madVR is wrong though, it kinda "washed out". Output level should be correct though. I tried the TV Level test clip and madVR is certainly not wrong. Or madVR is the only correct one here and all other renderer give me the same wrong so I never notice? I am not sure on that part.

It depends on your source. All the various sources use slightly different color formats/specs, different gamma transfer functions etc. madVR by default does what is needed for correct Blu-Ray playback. So for Blu-Ray maybe madVR is the only renderer with the correct colors? For SD content, however, what madVR does by default is incorrect. You can change the way how madVR does colorspace conversion by creating your own 3dlut file by using the "cr3dlut" tool. That gives you all the options you need including correcting the gamut of your display. A future madVR version will offer these settings in the GUI.

Originally Posted by Hypernova

Thrid, I didn't try all scaling method, but Lanczos and Spline both crash.

Weird. Could you please try any other besides Lanczos and Spline? Lanczos and Spline both use 3 or 4 taps. All other algorithms use only 2 taps. Maybe that is the difference? On my XPSP2 Lanczos and Spline work fine.

Can anybody else reproduce a crash with Lanczos or Spline activated?

Originally Posted by Hypernova

Finally, it certainly does not smooth. Compare to, say, EVR CP or mplayer.

Well, that's all. I'm on Windows 7 Beta 7000. ATi HD2600 with Catalysis 9.2

Ok, thanks for feedback. Improving motion smoothness is on the top of my priority list. However, the non-smoothness might also be caused by the HD2600 being too old/slow. Compared to my (entry level) HD3850, the HD2600 only has 1/3 of the shader power and only half of the memory bandwidth. You can try activating some of the "trade quality for performance" options. Maybe that helps smoothness for you?

[madshi]

Originally Posted by wozio

Did you use YV12 or YUY2? If yes then it is very unfair comparision since on ATI NV12 is color space of choice. It produces very good results

I've just retested with ATI NV12. The results are exactly the same as with YV12 for me. Please note that such ugly chroma upsampling artifacts are usually only visible in specific scenes. Especially red fonts on black background.

(MPC-HC, XPSP2, VMR9, HD3850, Catalyst 9.1.)

[littleD]

Ati 3450
Winxp sp3 drv 9.2
Funny, have no big delay when opening video. But have massive lag when closing player. Sytem freeze for a long moment. Similar behaviour occurs when minimizing.
Win7 7057 drv 9.4
Installing madrenderer requires give exact path to madVideoRenderer.ax file in bat installer. No problems with closing and minimizing.
On both systems small lag when going to fullscreen or back to windowed (connected with aspect ratio). Seeking is fast.
Unfortunatly, i need dxva to work, so i will stick to evr

[Thunderbolt8]

Originally Posted by madshi

Argh, another one added. Please use F5 to refresh.

thanks! both, haali and madvr look quite similar to each other, apart from that one can see that haali outputs a bit too much red.
but then im not that good on such graphic specific technical stuff, perhaps someone else sees differences?

is it actually possible technically to further improve the graphic quality of your renderer (hinting that it looks similar to haali, so this is basically best what can be achieved)? I mean at some point there must be a limit, when it looks exactly like the 'real' image looks like. but how is it possible that it actually looks different on each renderer? and how it is possible to perhaps make it look even better, but then again its not done by other renderers? (dont understand the process how such things can looks differently)

edit: cant seem to install it (winxp prof sp3), I get "LoadLibrary("madvideorenderer.ax") fehlgeschlagen - Das angegebene Modul wurde nicht gefunden." :S (windows login is listed as computer administrator).

*nvm, got it to work manually*

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

thanks! both, haali and madvr look quite similar to each other, apart from that one can see that haali outputs a bit too much red.
but then im not that good on such graphic specific technical stuff, perhaps someone else sees differences?

If you look at the "cF" comparison image from a further distance, the madVR image looks slighty smoother (less jaggied) to me than the Haali Renderer image. The difference is not big, though...

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

is it actually possible technically to further improve the graphic quality of your renderer (hinting that it looks similar to haali, so this is basically best what can be achieved)? I mean at some point there must be a limit, when it looks exactly like the 'real' image looks like. but how is it possible that it actually looks different on each renderer? and how it is possible to perhaps make it look even better, but then again its not done by other renderers? (dont understand the process how such things can looks differently)

With Blu-Ray the luma (brightness) information is stored in 1920x1080 pixels, however, the chroma (color) information is only stored in 960x540 pixels. So someone somewhere has to upscale those 960x540 chroma information to 1920x1080. There are a multitude of upscaling filters available, all have their advantages and disadvantages. That's why different renderers produce different results. madVR uses a very soft upscaler for chroma to get rid of jaggies. I don't think you can get much better results than what madVR already does right now for chroma upsampling.

[Thunderbolt8]

does soft here correspond to overall softness/sharpness of the image?

some small things:

- atm it doesnt seem to be possible to take screenshots in mpc-hc? (ffdshow & madvr)
- could you somehow integrate mpc's jitter display? atm it always displays 0ms all the time at playback, would be nice if it could display the actual information like with ffdshow & haali for example.

thanks!

btw. my installation problem seemed to result from a missing d3d .dll file (d3dx9_35.dll), which I had to download manually (dunno why, I have d3dx9_40.dll here though, is it newer?)

[Leak]

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

btw. my installation problem seemed to result from a missing d3d .dll file (d3dx9_35.dll), which I had to download manually (dunno why, I have d3dx9_40.dll here though, is it newer?)

Those d3dx9_xx DLLs are the regular Direct3D updates released every two to three months by Microsoft. You should get all of them if you run the DirectX web setup again.

(Yeah, it's still DirectX 9.0c, but look at the release date...)

[Thunderbolt8]

perhaps mine got somehow deleted or corrupted when windows once again crashed :P

btw. regarding all those madVR options (like resampling, dithering etc.) I guess the default choices are those which represent the displayed image most closely 1:1 (and I don't have to worry ) ?

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

does soft here correspond to overall softness/sharpness of the image?

When doing upscaling "soft" means less jaggies but also less sharpness. Fortunately our eyes are much more sensitive to brightness information than they are to color information. That's why e.g. LimitedSharpenFaster only modifies the luma (brightness) channel, but doesn't touch the chroma, AFAIK. So having soft chroma is actually a good thing. Having an overall soft image quality is not good, though. That's why madVR uses different scaling algorithms for chroma and luma.

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

- atm it doesnt seem to be possible to take screenshots in mpc-hc? (ffdshow & madvr)

True. Not implemented yet. I'm taking screenshots by doing PrintScreen.

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

- could you somehow integrate mpc's jitter display? atm it always displays 0ms all the time at playback, would be nice if it could display the actual information like with ffdshow & haali for example.

I don't know what exactly I'd have to do to make that work. I'm also not sure if jitter will make any difference once I implemented smooth motion display.

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

btw. my installation problem seemed to result from a missing d3d .dll file (d3dx9_35.dll), which I had to download manually (dunno why, I have d3dx9_40.dll here though, is it newer?)

Hmmmm... I guess _40 is newer than _35, but I don't really know why you had _40 but not _35!? Does anybody know?

Originally Posted by Thunderbolt8

btw. regarding all those madVR options (like resampling, dithering etc.) I guess the default choices are those which represent the displayed image most closely 1:1 (and I don't have to worry ) ?

If you display the source 1:1 in its original size, all luma scaling is turned off. The whole scaling options in the settings dialog have no effect in that situation. If you want to rescale the original resolution to something else, all the various filters have their own advantages and disadvantages, as I already said. E.g. Lanczos is the sharpest of the bunch, but also adds a lot of ringing to the image. Scaling is always a balance act between sharpness, aliasing and ringing. Just play with the filters and choose which looks best to your eyes...

[Hypernova]

I run the bat file by right click and choose run as admin, but it seems that does not work. Probably a bug on windows/UAC part, maybe. Your bat file work fine when run cmd as admin first then run the bat. So the problem is not on your part.

I think the scaling method crash may have something to do with something else entirely and not relate to the scaling itself. The thing is, I can't change the scaling method by go to MPC-HC options->external filter. When I change it there and play a file, it go back to default. When I right click while playing and change it by go to filter->madVR then close the file and reopen it, MPC-HC crash as soon as (I guess) the 96mb is filled and it try to display the video.

I may try what you suggest about the 3dlut later. I don't have a blu-ray file with me, so I can't test anything about that. I can't just use any 1080p video either right?

I would like to have choice in scaling though, so I probably keep checking back on madVR. Anyway, great work so far.

A little more info, I'm on Dell 3008WFP (2560x1600).

[Thunderbolt8]

Originally Posted by madshi

I don't know what exactly I'd have to do to make that work. I'm also not sure if jitter will make any difference once I implemented smooth motion display.

I guess it wont make any difference to smooth playback, but to recognize when the movie runs out of sync. you can see it quickly as soon as the numbers pile up that something is working not fast enough, sometimes despite to what windows cpu load screen tells.

as it seems here, the fps numbers of movies I tried partially seem to vary. sometimes its ~24, another time > 30. it seems like when the system is not fast enough, then playback & displayed fps rate speeds up? haali renderer for example then slows down.

so jitter display would be a nice thing to spot speed problems on a quick & safe to tell glance, while otherwise it seems to be a bit more of guessing ("is this already running too slow/fast?") to be really sure (I'd compare it to the delay guessing of thd tracks of old eac3to versions, when correct delay for truehd wasnt yet supported)

[wozio]

Originally Posted by madshi

I've used the standard which many decoders output by default, which is YV12. I don't think it's unfair. I didn't even know that ATI produces better results with NV12. And if even I didn't know that how do you think an average HTPC user will know that? Still, I'll look into how ATI compares with NV12...

For me average user also doesn't know how to use different than standard renderer and he doesn't know what the hell renderer is

Custom renderers are for enthusiasts and changing output color space is easy for them.

If you want any hardware acceleration working best on ATI you must use NV12, be it hardware decoding, deinterlacing, post processing or color conversion. All current commercial decoders use nv12 on ATI.

Regards
Piotr