Just thought I would share this with the good folk here. I've been enjoying my projector quite a bit for the last month (3 movies a night) and have discovered the joys of tweaking contrast, brightness, and gamma in overlay mode with my ATI catalyst driver.

My only disappointment was that, sometimes, colors appeared to be washed out a bit due to me having to crank my gamma to keep dark scenes visible. No one else noticed it, but it kinda bugged me.

Yesterday night, at about 12PM, on a whim, I fired up FFDshow with BS Player. Oh my GAWD, the difference is absolutely night and day. Not only added clarity from the sharpening filters, but the post-processing feature does something magical with dark scenes. It lightens them up without destroying saturation like cranking gamma does. I played with it slack jawed till about 2AM!

If you are not using an HTPC with ffdshow, you are not realizing the full potential of your projector! I can't wait to dive in further with ffdshow.

I guess that means the next project is going to be a more powerful pc

The primary purpose of making my projector was for video games. But now it seems that htpc's are a must have! :angry:

you dont have to have one ..... but you do have to have one, if you want your PJ to look really good.

You said yourself you hated the quality of PS2 with componant cables. (I think that was you) these projectors seem impossible to enjoy without an htpc, thus rendering video games virtually incompatible.

But with the N6, I connect my Xbox to it, and I can make certain color, contrast and brightness adjustments. Why are there no PC video cards that allow you to do something like this?

Yes FFDSHOW is damn nice, I also use it to clean up my crappy cable tv feed into my pvr-150, makes a world of difference there too

But in order to use FFDSHOW for cable tv, i have to run it in timeshift mode ( the mode that allows you pause etc, while buffering to my HD) if I try to run in live mode, the audio is out of sync. And when in timeshift mode, its alittle slower to change channels, but I will take the slower channel changes any day with how much better FFDSHOW makes my cable tv look

Well you can adjust the overlay gamma, brightness, color ect, when displaying any of your input video. So there are PC cards to accomodate, it would be in the same overlay control that we are adjusting now for DVD playback

HOWEVER, there are no PC video cards that accept component video (Not sure WHY), but there arent.

The Question remains however, and I believe it to be a STRONG possibility. A PC with an S-vid interlaced input, could potentially scale BETTER and end up looking better than the N6 with a progressive input. Not saying with certainty, but I believe it to be a good possibility.

As per my PS2, I hooked it up via an avermedia tv box 9, and I was very unhappy not just with the PS2 results, but DVD results as well. ALL around crappiness compared to the image I get with my PC.

Im afraid that PCs are your only option for a really good picture, Maybe you could use an LCD tv, that has component inputs directly into the monitor itself and get good results. They probably scale way better than an N6. Afterall thats gotta be the reason they are so much more expensive.

Yeah well I'm wondering how well this x2vga thing works. Originally I was thinking about getting it but forum members strongly advised against it in favor of the N6. At the time it seemed like the N6 was hailed as a god. Of course once I have it everyone tells me its total crap and maybe I should try x2vga. Go figure...

I believe there is also a vga adapter for PS2, for gamecube I read about one I think. If we were to connect these to the PC through VGA...maybe then we could take advantage of all the pc enhancement features.

It's about time someone started this thread. First off, some brevity word clarification. What is HTPC?

I tried setting ffdshow to play with my DVD movies played on my pc's player and there was no difference. By accident I played some saved movie clip on my harddrive in another format and "2" ffdshow icons appeared on my lower right tray on my desktop. As described earlier, the audio was out of sync. So, several questions here:

1) What is the average should a pc be equipped with in order to use ffdshow i.e. CPU speed, amount of RAMS, Video Card?

2) What version of ffdshow is best to use and why?

3) How the heck do I get ffdshow to operate automatically while playing my DVD's on my player in my pc or if I turn to cable tv, game systems or a regular DVD player or is this done manually somehow?

4) Aside from flycrt's config download it would be nice if we all share personal preference of configured settings.

I think we need an acronym FAQ.

HTPC: Home Theater Personal Computer.

1) As much as you care to spend. Any reasonable PC should now be capable of it to varying degrees. It can be a total resource hog, if you have the resources to give it.

2) Got me. I'd assume the latest.

3) Non PC inputs need to go through a capture card, of course, then a media player. It's the media player that needs to be configured.

4) There will be as many personal preferences as there are users. It will also depend on the processors and other details of the individual systems. My preference is to just let WinDVD scale my DVD images. The TV, I can live with the 640X480 that it gets by default. Then again, my HTPC isn't anything to brag about, except the price tag: Scavenged parts from retired systems, so it's all free. I also have a nice AMD64, for games on a KVM switch. The HTPC does a good enough job playing DVDs, though the AMD64 still manages to look smoother -- probably because there's more CPU for image resizing available.

Edit: Oh yeah... PC video cards don't tend to accept component video.

Capture cards are working very hard already keeping up to regular broadcast. They don't just display it like a TV set, they need to encode it. A card wth a CPU can do it on-board, and the PC just needs to transfer the data to it's PCI bus.

640/720X480 is already pushing it for that. Raw data which needs to be encoded by the main CPU can bring even the fastest systems to their knees -- not because of the processing requirements, but because of sheer I/O. The mainboards just don't have the throughput. Running a capture of the data in 480p pretty much demands exclusive use of a PC already, unless you're willing to live with glitches.

PCI Express holds some promise, here, because it has so much more bandwidth, but since it's relatively new, it may be a while before we start seeing HDTV capture cards. (To date, this is the only REALLY convincing argument for the input specs on PCI-e being able to act as such a high speed input device.)

You'll also notice that PC cards don't accept VGA input. Component output, we can do. Output is much easier than input for a PC.

Watching a 1950's TV through stained glass with cataracts looks better than the N6 with a progressive input.



I cannot stress enough how much better one of these transcoders looks over an N6. The difference is like night and day. It won't solve your brightness problem, but you will get a MUCH higher quality crystal clear picture. As a matter of fact, the picture will be perfect.

I would suggest getting a Vdigi instead of the X2VGA. That way it is compatible with everything....Xbox, ps2, progressive scan DVD player, etc.

If you could not tell a difference then something was not setup correctly. There is a website that has a nice tutorial on how to setup ffdshow. I don't have the link right now. It is on my computer at home. If someone else hasn't posted it by tonight I will try to find it. FFDSHOW will not work with all media players. Most people are using ZoomPlayer Pro. It is $20 but you can download and try it for free.

Would it be possible for you to post pics of your cable tv with and without FFDSHOW?

thx

Thanks Brianabs, looking forward to the help
(edit) Tried with PowerDVD and nothing, but when playing that clip on the HD with Mediaplayer thats when it came up. Perhaps your right. Is ZoomPlayer Pro the most popular media to use?

If you looking to get started with FFDSHOW then THIS is the place where you would start. That is the link brianabs was probably talking about.

FFDSHOW can also be used with a free program called Media Player Classic. I use Zoomplayer because it has more flexibility but MPC is a good program to see what this program can do.

The ffdshow capabilities are really pretty amazing, but you will need to do some research and alot some butt time to going through all the settings (dozens of them) in order to get the picture you want, but when you do - wow!

Here's a link for Media Player Classic:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...ackage_id=84358

Here's a Lumenlab link that has tons of discussion re ffdshow and lots of actual settings for you to emulate:

http://www.lumenlab.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5141

Hope that helps

LMFAO .... WOW .....

So true!!!

do you use it to upscale your tv feed?

Thanks Jayman, can't wait to get home and try ffdshow now. The samples at that site you posted is unbelievable, hope I get the same results.
sim

I was wondering if in theory, if we had someone smart enough, could we write our own display driver configured specifically for lumenlab projectors?

why reinvent the wheel? what would you have it do that current software wouldn't do?

Thanks Jayman. That is the link I was referring to.

Hey hey sorry paladin, I am 100% dig camless atm, I have not even been able to set up my plog

And Mikyd1954 yes I do set my FFDSHOW to upscale my cable to XGA for my panel, and I use its deinterlacer (and sharpen to a very small degree, the cable source doesn't have alot of resolution to work with), I also use blur and NR and I use the picture properties of it to adjust my luminance and gamma and RGB levels.

I have been using a nice little prog GBPVR for quite some time now and its free I used to beyond TV 3 but I like this one much better, its highly configurable and is very easy to make use of dscaler and ffdshow with.

http://www.gbpvr.com/ and in their wiki you can set up tons of add on features, like tabs for weather, file explorer, calculatror, running your mame or emulators, and be able to play iso's movies from daemon tools, or from dvd drives etc. I really really like this prog, due to its open format with lots of add ons, ease of use with ffdshow ( the only thing I found with FFDSHOW and the gbpvr is I have to watch my TV in timeshift mode, the mode that lets you pause etc, or the audio is slightly out of sync).

Oh and I am canadian so I used Zap2It for my listings for my cable.

Oh and it also has a section for streaming internet radio with some pretty good channels on it, and with the addable tab for mame, emulators etc. You can aslo program up all your links to your games etc, and load them up right from its interface via your remote

I also keep two very differnt FFDSHOW configs for TV and DVDs. The only thing I have not figured out yet, is to make it take advantage of VLC player via remote for my HD movies, as the DVD player does not like HD movies, it stutters and closes the movie. So I have to load up my VLC manually and load my movies up that way.

Well, just tried Zoomplayer pro with ffdshow last night and I couldnt get it to work properly. Red messages indicating errors with codecs. Downloaded trial version of ZP pro and paid for Sonic DVD. Any ideas, guys? If not guess Ill have to try Media Player Classic.

Wondering if I may to reformat again, system's been acting kinda strange. :angry:

Nintari's site has a good little aticle that will get your through the basics with setting up FFDSHOW http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=ffdshowdvd_1

Ok, same question, two different threads... This is probably the most relavent thread, but i'll link to the answer I gave in the other. here. Sorry for making something simple into something complicated. Oh well... such is life...

hehe, we gotta stop meeting like this. Thanks GSmith, think I'll just stay on this thread concerning ffdshow, it would be easier for others.

Thanks GadgetSmith, it worked. You too Brianabs and Jayman, thanks for the great help! After putting in that DWORD in registry and installed FLYCRJ's configs once more, popped in StarWars widescreen, sat back and WOW, oooo, NIIICE really NICE. Will post pics at plog later. Was amazed how the black areas showed more details which I couldn't see just playing from DVD on rig as SonicWonder said. Noticed I couldnt tweak to much without system jittering. Is it me or does the new clean and clear images make you feel like watching your movies again for the 'humphteen' time?

Hey. That is great. I am glad you got it working. You will find the gamma setting very valuable in making the picture brighter. FFDSHOW is awesome! It should probably have it's own pinned thread. It is not the easiest thing to figure out since it is not very straight forward. I know I didn't know how to make it work until someone pointed me to the article on htpcnews and told me about the reg hack. Can't wait to see some pics. Be sure and show before and after.

Brian

Definately, I would also suggest LL include this little info in their plans for those new to this if thats ethical . It would definately get the attention of a few others to climb on board. Gamma huh? Will look into it, thanks again B!

Both Picture Properties and levels has gamma correction. I just use picture properties because you can also tweak luminence and rgb. The cool thing is you can adjust while the moving is playing.

Click to view attachment

Brianabs: Can't seem to get picture properties to function correctly without my system jitterbuggig. I think I'm running a 2.2 AMD Barton if I recalled when first building it. I have 1gig of RAMS using a Nvidia Geforce 5200 fx Ultra at 128 megs. Any ideas? I liked the image I got when initializing picture properties but the 'stop and go' effect was giving me a headache

Here's something I discovered: by using Gamma and Levels, you can increase the details in the blacks WITHOUT turning the blacks into grays:

In Picture Properties, increase Gamma (here it is on 2), which results in a very grey picture, but with much more visible details in dark scenes.
To make the blacks black again, go to Levels, and slide the Input cursor to the beginning of the bars in the histogram:

before:


after:


Try this

EDIT: After playing with the Gamma in the Levels dialogue instead of the one in Picture Properties, I now realise that this slider does exactly what I've described (ie increase dark scene details without sacrificing true blacks)
Much simpler.