6600GT disappointment

[bpsmicro]

Future Shop (Canada) had a good sale price on the BFG 6600 GT AGP card, so since everybody raves about them I thought I'd grab one. Yesterday it arrived and I spent a few hours poking at it. I swapped out my ATI 9600XT, which is pretty good but too jerky in 3D mode.

I managed to get the component video output to my Hitachi TV working at all the HDTV outputs (hint: download and read the full manual, starting at page 95, as instructed in the dialogs). It looks good, but standard-def comes up with the bars on the side and my TV's "stretch" modes don't allow me to make it look nice. A letterbox movie looks abysmally small. I may go back to that eventually and get used to it, but for now I decided to play with the S-Video output.

The colors on the S-video output are awful. Way too overdriven so all the faces look red. I messed around with all the adjustments and while I can make Windows and the test screens look stellar, the BTV output is just plain awful and I can't seem to improve it much.
After a while I put back in the 9600XT. With it, out of the box, the S-video output looks pretty much identical to the input (from satellite).

Not one to give up easily, I'll probably take another stab at it next week (when everybody is out of the house so I can mess with it undisturbed). I'm just wondering if anybody has any tips on adjustments I can make.

Oh, and I could *only* get 3D working with the nVidia decoder (the one that came with the card, installed as "nvDVD"). No other decoder would work in 3D. It was still jerky, leaving me with the opinion that I need to make an overall system improvement at some point. I notice it's related to hard disk usage (disk light comes on, video loses a frame or two). I'm not sure if upgrading to a SATA drive will help there. I've got a 160Gig ATA drive in there now.

Brad.

[nanook105]

I made three changes to the nvidia decoder in the properties panel.

I changed display type to Anamorphic/Raw Aspect (this seemed to have the most impact on stretch issues

I changed deinterlace control from smart to automatic

And if you want to use 3D, I think that you need to change Enhanced Nview support to Prefer VMR9.

I also use stretch mode for my BTV aspect ratio.

[bpsmicro]

Thanks Nanook. Next time I try I'll have to look for those.

I also did some reading and noticed that if I use 480p (or 480i) at the input to my TV, it allows all the same various stretch modes available when I use S-video, so I'll try that too.

If I can get that all working, I'll have to see whether I can swap out my separate DVD player and use the DVD drive in the HTPC box. Isn't DVD playing something Beyond Media is supposed to do? I haven't played with that since right now the HTPC is exclusively for BTV recording/playing.

Brad.

[nanook105]

I use 720p with compontent.

I use Beyond Media (DVD Library plugin) to play all of my DVDs. Works great

[tenax]

i went through same basic change you did. went from a sapphire 9600xt to the bfg card. it's going into a 54 inch panasonic. i'm using earlier version of the nvidia drivers..they just seem to work best for me 66.93 and 71.82 seem to work best for me in all regards after playing with all of those available. now, i'm curious what you're using for the software to play shows? i use and have used theatertek after the many recommendations. it has been flawless since almost day one and my output in all regards..colours, clarity, options to change screen size have been fabulous..when i first got my nvidia card i tried windows player and a bunch of others and was really unhappy with the ability for the nvidia properties to size into my screen properly..since i got theatertek, it's a simple thing to create custom sizes that work nicely on my pc screen and big screen. i would highly recommend it to anyone

[bpsmicro]

I've taken notes and I'm going to make another run at it today. If I can get the stretch modes to work as desired with 720p, that'd be ideal (because the picture looked great, even though just upconverted). If not, I can probably just use 480p and get *some* improvement over s-video.

I used the driver disk that came with the card, but failed to note the version number. I also downloaded the latest drivers from nVidia's site, but what I've read in a few places indicate it might not be best to "upgrade" in a hurry.

I'm just using BTV "stock" to play my recordings. I'm not familiar with TheatreTek, or what it gets me. Is it specific to playing DVDs?

If I get the picture working, my next step is to get the Shuttle's optical out (SPDIF) working (in theory it should just work). Obviously if I'm going to use the HTPC to play DVDs it's going to have to support DD 5.1 (my main amp doesn't support DTS, so that's not a priority yet). I'll then drop into the Beyond Media forums and figure out what else I'm going to need to get to play DVDs, presumably BM and some sort of actual player software (is this where TheatreTek comes in?).

Thanks for all the notes.

[tenax]

i use theatertek for dvd and for recorded show playback. it includes the nvidia decoder which is considered by many to be the best for picture quality and is also supported by beyond tv (select in your playback menu). so, rather than just buying the famed nvidia decoder you buy theatertek and get the nvidia decoder with it! hope that helps .


re: drivers included with the bfg card, it's been a while since i got it of course, but i recall the drivers included on the disk to be very old versions so you'll likely want to get something newer asap!

theatertek site link i believe is simply theatertek.com for more info on the proggie

[bpsmicro]

Thanks Tenax. Great pointer.

I just got back up from my second round, and it went much better this time thanks to the advice here. The missing piece of the puzzle was the 'G' key to let me change the aspect ration for BTV. Oddly, that doesn't seem to be documented in the list of hotkeys, but I saw it mentioned in another thread here.

The nvDVD app installed with the driver disk I got had most of the settings referred to my nanook, but named differently. Once installed I got it looking pretty good at both 720p and 1080i, but I found I slightly preferred 720p on my TV.
I then installed the PureVideo trial, and saw the options wording nanook referred to, but didn't really see an increase in quality/performance, at least in BTV. I'd imagine DVD playing would be different (that's my next experiment). At US$90, that's a mighty expensive package (heck, I can buy three new DVD players for that kind of money).
I need to do a bit of reading to understand the relationship between BM, BTV and TheaterTek. So far I'm failing to see any added value from BM other than a menu system to call into the other apps (I don't do music or still images or any of that stuff).

I'll run with the existing BFG drivers for a while, and then try the latest nVidia drivers and see if I notice a difference (good or bad).

[tenax]

i'm with you on BM..for my purposes, i don't have a need for it..yep, theatertek ain't cheap..a few tips on that..a) you might consider the version without advanced audio..save you $20..also, keep an eye out on the resellers as they are more likely to have a discount sometimes...


this link is pretty good for pros and cons, rather than just hype at the theatertek forum:

http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=566

[bpsmicro]

A fairly key thing for me is that my HTPC box is exclusively controlled by my MX500 remote (unless I'm doing Administration work). Its primary purpose in life is the PVR stuff via BTV.
So if I decided to expand this box to also play DVDs, the solution would have to be seamless via the remote, which rather implies BM. If BM launched some external app to do the actual playing, that's okay as long as I can get back via the remote. The cool thing is that with the MX500 & Girder combination I have, I can set the MX500 to send keystrokes and *should* be able to make this all work.
Like most of us here, the WAF is critical. :-)