[lapino]

Just starting with xbmc so pretty new to this. I had a Popcorn Hour and this made even low quality divx look pretty ok on my plasma. Installed my htpc today, using 1080p hdmi and xbmc, but divx looks pretty 'soft'. Is there something I need to do to improve this?

[my2sense]

Have you tried the video scaling methods in the video menu (when you're playing a video)? Some people have reported that Lanczos3 optimized seems to be the best method.

[lapino]

Didn't seem to make much difference.

[o_dog]

well, there is a limit to how much you can improve it. enable post processing for sd content. other than that you're just out of luck.

[ubuntuf4n]

just wondering where the 'normal' Lanczos3 is gone..

[bobo1on1]

You need this in advancedsettings.xml to be able to use the normal lanczos3 scaler:

Code:

<advancedsettings>
  <video>
    <allowlanczos3>true</allowlanczos3>
  </video>
</advancedsettings>

Reason for that is that the lanczos3 scaler is about 3 times as slow as the lanczos3 optimized scaler, so you need a very fast gpu to be able to use it.

[JustinAiken]

Would an 8500GT be sufficient?

[bobo1on1]

Probably not.

[CrystalP]

Not strong enough.

[therealjoeblow]

I don't know why XBMC itself has issues with lanczos resizing and GPU/CPU power - I use ffdshow with lanczos4 in software *all* the time, even with 720p upscaling to 1080p, and it never gets the CPU up more than 50%. But I've personally never been able to use any of the built-in XBMC lanczos or even bicubic resizers, they just stutter for me.

That said, if you're adventurous, you might want to try the DSPlayer development build of XBMC - it will let you use any directshow codec combination you want.

I (and many others) have found that the built in codecs in the main XBMC branch (FFMPEG) are extremely soft, and prone to decoding artifacts, and that FFDShow will give much better results without any other tweaks at all.

For the absolute best picture quality you can get (for SD up to 720p HD), letting FFDShow do the decoding and rescaling will be very visibly better than XBMC on its own. Configuring it can take a bit of work, but I wrote a detailed step-by-step guide and posted it on the DSPlayer thread some time ago. It was lost when the database crash occurred last Feb/March, but some kind member had a local copy saved and reposted it afterwards. You can find it here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=506...count=2023

Cheers
The REAL Joe

[bobo1on1]

Get a faster videocard

[therealjoeblow]

Get a faster videocard

Why should I get a faster video card when what I need done can *easily* be done on the CPU with what I've already got? Makes absolutely no sense at at all.

Cheers
The REAL Joe

[Flomaster]

don't download dixv content?


-=Jason=-