[ghost02]

Hi guys, I had some parts laying around and decided to try my luck at building a home media center. I installed XBMCbuntu, upgraded to the latest stable release, 12.3. The interface is lovely and vivid but when I try play a 720p video off my network the quality is quite blurry and washed out and worse than playing the file directly off my TV (Samsung EH5300) or my XBOX360. Is this normal or due to my intergrated graphics card? I've played around trying to change to software decoding but it looks like that has made it worse. There is no lagging and it seams like the CPU usage doesn't go to high so I'm not sure if there is a way to push it higher to give better quality?

Specs
Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H
Intel G1820 2.7Ghz Celeron
4GB Ram

I also compared it to my normal PC and the normal PC's quality is also much better, but that could be because of using an i7, 280x and more ram? Sorry for the questions but I've googled for hours and couldn't find a solution.

[DaVu]

upgraded to the latest stable release, 12.3

Sure you have the latest stable?....The latest stable is 13.1:
http://xbmc.org/download/

Install that and offer a Debug Log if you still run into any problems

[ghost02]

upgraded to the latest stable release, 12.3

Sure you have the latest stable?....The latest stable is 13.1:
http://xbmc.org/download/

Install that and offer a Debug Log if you still run into any problems

Thanks David, will give that a go. Do you know if the Intel onboard graphics is enough for compressed 720p and 1080p? Neither lag but I'm not sure if there are other factors involved.

[FernetMenta]

The G1820 plays anything you throw at it without issues. I use a 1820T in my living room box. Disable hw acceleration and enable multithreaded sw decoding. For scaling method choose Lanczos fast.

[Jeremy517]

Edit: ignore.

[Kib]

Configure your Intel drivers by right-clicking in the desktop and selecting Graphics Properties. Under the "Media" tab, in the Image Enhancement section, turn off Adaptive Contrast Enhancement, Film Mode Detection, and Skin Tone Enhancement.

On XBMCBuntu ?

[Jeremy517]

Oops, my mistake. I don't know if that applies. Ignore me.

[ghost02]

The G1820 plays anything you throw at it without issues. I use a 1820T in my living room box. Disable hw acceleration and enable multithreaded sw decoding. For scaling method choose Lanczos fast.

Thanks, upgrading and changing those settings helped, couldn't find Lanczos fast though.

[fritsch]

He means: "Lanczos 3 Optimized" which is a per Video setting. You can choose it by clicking on the film reel when playing a movie. Make sure to _not_ select that for 1080p content as that would be nonsense.