Sky Dscaler settings?

rhinoman

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Now I am finally happy with my dvd playback using my Celeron 1.2 ATI Sapphire 9000 based HTPC I though that it is time to begin experimenting with dscaler using a Pinnacle Rave as the input card.

This is only really for Satellite TV from my Sky+. Untill now I've been using a proV and am relatively happy with the results and certainly its ease of use but as my DVD picture has gradually improved the Sky has begun to get left behind. My initial trials with dscaler were awful but a clean install later and the noise from the picture has largely disappeared but the overall image definatly lags the proV.

I am using either bob or weave de-interlacing with sharpness and gradual noise filters. If I use the auto find de-interlacing it generally picks 2:2 flip on odd. While this produces a piucture free from scaling artifacts, there is a softness to the picture, when I go back to the proV the sharpness and closeup detail are improved at the expense of fast motion scaling.

Are my setting typical, do I need more processing power to run different algorithms, is my capture card the reason for the overall softness (it defiantly produces a noisier picture)?? Your veiws would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
Hello John.

Try running without the gradual noise filter. Also 2:2 will be for film originated material: video should really be going as tomsmocmp for best quality. I'd lose the sharpness filter also.
 
Thanks Keith, I must admit I havent tried the tomsmocomp, I'll give it a go but defiently found the noise and sharpness filters to be an impovement.

When you change colur and brightness settings from within dscaler it obviously is the overlay settings but does it change the defaults or does it just effect the dscaler settings?
 
Hi,

I am new to dscaler and ran a tv output via my pinacle tv card which was a bit jaggedy so I launched dscaler and hung the whole system :(
I was than stupid enough to do the same again :D
What am I doing wrong....Is this software only set to work with an external source like SKY via the composite in??

Ta


Chris
 
I just got a rave card myself - 720x576 s-video cap and scaling for 30 quid - bargain or what :)

Chris, I did that dscaler3-hang-reboot jobbie about 4 times myself - same result every time :blush: Then I tried v4.0 alpha, no tuner - worked first time! Oh yes, I dumped the pinnacle drivers and used the bt8x8 generic ones. Looks good, and with the huffyuv codec I can cap uncompressed then encode to mpeg2 later - awesome!
 
John.

The overlay controls in Dscaler just apply to dscaler ( I asked this question myself not so long ago). The correct way to set-up is set the capture settings on the card (video settings) either manually or use the auto-calibration feature ( I use the TPM region2 optimode test pattern : best use I've found for the disc! you can then touch up the settings manually)

There is also something about full luma range you might want to ensure is checked ( search the dscaler forum)

Then you leave them alone and adjust the Dscaler overlay settings for final calibration.(again I just went through the optimode tests: I'd have preferred VE or avia but I couldn't be bothered getting into some NTSC settings vs PAL malarkey and figuring out how Dscaler holds its settings)

My ae100 settings were calibrated using the published scoped overlay settings from Theatertek: I now leave the projector settings alone . (small change I dropped the gamma from the published settings: however recently I've gone back up again: good transfers were great looking at the lowest settings but it showed up some lesser ones 75 seems to be a good compromise)

I could be wrong but I think you want to make the resolution 768x576 rather than 720x576 as its an originally analogue signal and you are using a digital display device ( it may vary from display to display too)

I use judder terminator also. The adaptive noise filter seems to work well most of the time but I get dropped frames running tomsmocomp with it (2:2 is fine though so good for film based material).

I've been toying with the idea of getting an H3D card but its a lot of money for just watching TV occasionally and gaming! Maybe a cut down H3D card with just an s-video and component input would be worth it but I'm still not sure it would cure some of the noise problems I get (missus never notices).
 
Hi Keith,

For films I quite like the 2:2 + adaptive noise + sharpness, it give the foreground cleaness of the proV with extra detail from the superior scaling ability in the background. Tried the tomsmocomp tonight and it seems quite good but I cant run it with anything else selected without it dropping frames, consequently I think the proV provides as good a picture overall because it seems to provide a cleaner picture.

I've been toying with the idea of getting an H3D card but its a lot of money for just watching TV occasionally and gaming! Maybe a cut down H3D card with just an s-video and component input would be worth it but I'm still not sure it would cure some of the noise problems I get (missus never notices).

Me too, $600 maybe, £600 with import duty delivery and VAT makes it much harder to decide, for the same money I could buy a Falcon and upgrade the MB and processor and still have change. How much difference will it really make for Sky (Jeff?), or do I wait for the new Conexant chipset cards maybe....How much more user friendly (ie wife, she copes all right with Theatretek and a pronto though) is the H3D, compared to the complexity of knowing what to pick in Dscaler (or isn't it) and I wonder where the H3D will sit in a years time once the hardware ages:(
 
I'm now using an XCapture card, it costs $39 in the US. It was a bugger to import (and costly), but I got it in the end. I also got a card for John Adcock so he could finally add cx23881 support to DScaler. Its working pretty good right now, the picture is very clean similar to the H3D. Both cards suffer from some chroma /luma missmatch similar to Chroma delay but not (using svideo). I think its a matter of time before all the correct chip advanced settings are programmed into DScaler. Once this is done it will look great (looks pretty good right now). Start looking for a local supplier boys.
 
cool thanks for the info Jeff.
 

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