How do YOU adjust & optimize video/picture settings?

[Marc_G 92]

Hi folks,

 

New TV (Panasonic 60ST60 plasma) and today fresh re-install of Win7x64. For the first time I've gone the LAV route. But I'm struggling to figure out how to optimize the picture. There are so many places to make related adjustments. For example, I've got an ATI Radeon 5670. I can change things like gamma / contrast in the Catalyst control center. I can choose to do the Nominal Range hack, or not. I can use the LAV settings to control 0-255 vs 16-234. I can adjust the TV picture settings themselves.

 

As Charlie Brown would say, AAUUGH!

 

How do You do it, based on Windows platforms? How do you decide which tweaks to make where?

 

I spent lots of time tweaking things in my last HTPC/TV incarnation, but the TV was primitive and really the only real place to change things was the ATI controls, and a few broad TV tweaks.

 

So, I think I have to learn from scratch. Help me, please!

 

If you have some advice or good links to get things squared away, I'd appreciate it.

 

Media Browser 3 / Classic was a super easy reinstall, by the way. Thanks for the FAQ on what to back up!

 

Marc

[Yogi 367]

Have a look on the AVS Forums,specifically here

 

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1466472/2013-panasonic-settings-issues-thread

 

There is lots of different settings that can be fine tuned,but really it is up to you how you like it.Different vartiables,is it a dark or light room etc.I sugest you play around with it and get the settings to your liking.

 

Cheers

[Marc_G 92]

Thanks. I've actually read much of that thread, as well as almost all of the specific Panny ST60 owner's thread. I guess my questions are more general for "HTPC with higher end modern TVs" than Panasonic specific. It's challenging these days! So many places to tweak things!

 

I guess I'm looking for some dependable things to lock down to narrow my variables a bit.

Edited October 19, 2013 by Marc_G

[DigiTM 60]

Maybe have a look at this. I ran AVSHD and calibrated my TV this way. It's a calibration routine that is highly recommended that is free.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5858625/how-to-calibrate-your-hdtv-and-boost-your-video-quality-in-30-minutes-or-less

Edited October 19, 2013 by DigiTM

[all4dom 73]

WMV also has some calibration settings if you ate doing everything through media center. Also, google search your tv to see what settings people are using for optimized video. If your ate tweaking lab filter, talk to Jon, he's an expert on this & all things htpc.

[JeremyFr79 228]

I run my Media Center in a fully calibrated room, one thing I will say is you're lucky to have an ATI card, I say this because nVidia's drivers have been broke for years and as such wont allow you to work in the correct color space for a T.V.  Never adjust any settings in your video card control panel like contrast etc, leave those all set to defaults.  Make sure you turn off any "enhancers" that ATI has to offer.  The first thing you'll want to do is make sure your video card is set to output 4:2;2 color space, this is labeled as RGB limited, and Y:Pb:Pr 4:2:2 in the ati control panel, should be labled as pixel mode or something (been a while since I went through this.)  in LAV make sure it's set to output in TV (limited RGB) 16-255, also uncheck any color mode that doesn't begin with a Y (like y12, y10 etc)  and check all the RGB Modes.  This should get you pretty much reference output that you'd expect from a consumer grade device like a blu-ray player.  Now find yourself a good calibration disc and calibrate the TV setting's using the disc.  Since you're a fellow Panny Plasma owner I will tell you these few things most don't realize with Panny Plasmas.  Don't bother calibrating until you have at least 100hrs of use or more on it, the reason being is that the pixels take time to settle and color/brightness etc will shift around on you quite a bit for the first 100 or so hours.  2nd make sure everything you play on it for those 1st 100 hours is full screen, I don't care if you have the stretch the content and it looks like crap just make sure you don't watch anything with any type of bars for the first 100 hours this will help make sure the pixels evenly settle and you don't have future burn in issues.  Feel free to message me with questions I'll try to help best I can, and welcome to owning one of the most beautiful pictures you'll lay eyes on for a T.V.!

[JeremyFr79 228]

P.S. I personally use the Disney WOW disc to calibrate all my setups (3) its great because it has features to calibrate different display technologies and since my 3 setups are all different displays this come's in quite handy.  1 is a Front Projection system, another is a direct view Plasma, and the 3rd is a direct view LCD, all have their caveats when it comes to calibration.

[Marc_G 92]

Jeremy, thanks. 

 

Indeed, even before I got the set I had read pretty much the entire ST60 owners thread on the AVS forum (~280 pages... wow ... plus the D-Nice settings thread and some others). I've been ageing the set with the slides D-Nice recommends, less from a calibration prep perspective and more from a "uniform phosphor conditioning perspective." I'll hit 100 hours in the next day or so and let it continue for a bit.

 

I've left the HDMI input on the TV at limited and am using RGB limited as the ATI output. However, based on numerous recommendations I'm using the 4:4:4 version of it to avoid chroma subsampling or some such like that... but staying in the limited color space, and the white/black values are more or less where they should be, subject to screen conditioning and final tv-level tweaks.

 

I've got AVSHD and WOW to use, both in .ISO form and as split out MKVs I can route through WMC.

 

I learned from various places to turn off essentially all the "ATI crap" though I may wind up putting back motion smoothing and or 3:2 pulldown detection if it helps.

 

At this point TV looks pretty good (understatement) but I'm suffering some playback issues. Using straight W7x64 + LAV filters, and SD content looks like crap with messed up deinterlacing. Looks fine if I run it through MPC-HC but playing straight from WMC it's awful. I'm also getting either dropped frames or some sort of stutter (HD & SD) through WMC without MPC-HC. Never had this problem before when I was W7x86 without LAV on the same hardware.

 

My next efforts are going to figuring out why the stuttering and poor deinterlacing is going on. It might be my old dual core AMD 2.7 Kuma (and related motherboard) are just not up to modern snuff... I might wind up replacing board/CPU/memory and going with an I3.

 

But, I'll explore with the hardware I have and see if I can sort it.

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Marc

Edited October 21, 2013 by Marc_G

[JeremyFr79 228]

Let the TV do the 3:2 pull down not ATI, also don't use Motion Smoothing on the Panny it looks like ass and stutters like crazy.  I've never used ATI's motion smoothing, but then again I've never seen a motion smoothing that I've liked, they all look like a soap opera to me.  The only stuttering issues I've had were with an nVidia set trying to output native 24p it would stutter bad, but yet leaving it on 60hz 24p played smooth, it was the oddest thing especially since the Panny will accept 24p native and convert it to 600hz, My ATI system I'm using now is running into a 24p native projector so I use a res switch app to change from 23.90 to 59.60 hz depending on content so I'm always feeding the projector at native frame rate.  My panny now is running off an Xbox 360 as an extender so it's always outputing 60hz to the Panny and the Panny is doing the 3:2 pull down, this isn't optimal of course as feeding the T.V. a native frame rate of the material is best, but hey it works and looks well enough for me.  With my projector it doubles the frame rate to 48fps for 24p content and looks awesome, no flicker since it's a 3chip LCD and motion is like butter without losing the natural motion blur that should be there.

[JeremyFr79 228]

Sorry forgot, as for the 4:2:2 vs 4:4:4, bluray and all other video content is natively 16-255, not 0-255 hence why you want to use limited, 4:4:4/0-255 is only used in the computer realm so by using 4:4:4 converting the video several times before you visibly see it on the screen thus degrading the quality.

[Marc_G 92]

Thanks Jeremy. Useful stuff. I'll start testing things out. I'm clearly missing something about 4:4:4 vs 4:2:2.  My RGB options are only 4:4:4, either limited or full they both are 4:4:4. I understand limited versus full, which I thought was a discrete issue from 4:4:4 vs 4:2:2. Still, it's easy enough to try RGB 4:4:4 Limited versus YCbCr ones and see which looks better. I thought the 4:2:2 issue was about chroma subsampling versus encoding the full info for each pixel, discrete from whether the color space was limited or full. I'll need to research some more.

 

I'm definitely seeing some stutter/judder/whatever. ATI stuff is off, Panny 3:2 is on and I forget where my motion smoothing is now, probably default for the Cinema mode.

 

What processor do you have? I'm on an old processor / mobo (AMD dual core 2.7 Ghz Kuma) and might decided to upgrade the system.

 

Marc

[JeremyFr79 228]

The stuttering is most likely the motion smoothing on the Panny being enabled, I get the same thing on mine, it's utterly useless and I've seen the same issue on other brands as well from crappy software inside the TV trying to interpolate the frames.  as for processors, my main rig is an Intel Q9300 feeding an ATI 6450 512mb, it originally was an e6350 dual core though and never had any issues with it.  My other Media Center machine is an Nvidia ION ITX system which just has an Atom dual core, and what is essentially an integrated Nvidia 9300 using RAM for video memory, it to has never had any issue playing anything I throw at it.  Video playback is video card intensive, not CPU so as long as your codecs are setup correctly and you have an adequate video card you should in most cases never see much CPU utilization for playback of Video.  The 5670 you have should be more than fine, you'll want to make sure you're using DXVA2 compliant codecs and that they are set to use DXVA2 so that they offload all the work to the video card instead of the CPU.

[Marc_G 92]

I turned off the motion smoothing all the way (it was at low or mid) and that improved the smoothness I believe. I will need to watch for a while to confirm. 3:2 pulldown option is grayed out... not sure why, but it's off.

 

I'm having one other problem that I just can't seem to figure out with WMC: when I play an overscan test pattern in MPC-HC or TMT, I get exact pixel perfect alignment of the pattern on the screen. But when I play through WMC, the very same file, I'm missing one column of pixels at the extreme right. Based on the moire patterns I get on the right side of the screen with single pixel grid patterns, it looks like WMC is always stretching the screen by that one pixel width... it's insignificant on the left side of the screen but gradually toward the patterns are misaligned with the physical pixels.

 

I've tried setting up the screen as either flat panel or TV in WMC. I've also tried installing the hotfix re: white/dark pixels on the left side... it wouldn't run, saying it wasn't applicable to my system.

 

Again, this is only a WMC thing... all other players display things perfectly. It happens whether I use the standard windows media foundation codecs or LAV on my system. It's sort of a single pixel overscan biased toward the right.

 

Any thoughts how to correct this? If not, I may decide to use MPC-HC as an external player, though I really prefer WMC native player. And I watch a fair amount of recorded TV, which would be annoying to configure an external player for.

 

Marc

[JeremyFr79 228]

I turned off the motion smoothing all the way (it was at low or mid) and that improved the smoothness I believe. I will need to watch for a while to confirm. 3:2 pulldown option is grayed out... not sure why, but it's off.

 

I'm having one other problem that I just can't seem to figure out with WMC: when I play an overscan test pattern in MPC-HC or TMT, I get exact pixel perfect alignment of the pattern on the screen. But when I play through WMC, the very same file, I'm missing one column of pixels at the extreme right. Based on the moire patterns I get on the right side of the screen with single pixel grid patterns, it looks like WMC is always stretching the screen by that one pixel width... it's insignificant on the left side of the screen but gradually toward the patterns are misaligned with the physical pixels.

 

I've tried setting up the screen as either flat panel or TV in WMC. I've also tried installing the hotfix re: white/dark pixels on the left side... it wouldn't run, saying it wasn't applicable to my system.

 

Again, this is only a WMC thing... all other players display things perfectly. It happens whether I use the standard windows media foundation codecs or LAV on my system. It's sort of a single pixel overscan biased toward the right.

 

Any thoughts how to correct this? If not, I may decide to use MPC-HC as an external player, though I really prefer WMC native player. And I watch a fair amount of recorded TV, which would be annoying to configure an external player for.

 

Marc

I haven't run into that issue, all my stuff seems to play pixel for pixel and it would be more than obvious on a 106" screen lol, that's an odd one for sure, there may be some registry settings for WMC, also you may want to make sure to press info while playing the file and make sure that none of the "stretch" modes in WMC are enabled.

[JeremyFr79 228]

Also ATI card's are a bit odd with refresh rates, for 24hz you actually want to set it to 23, and for 60 you'll want to use 59, it's an ATI thing, but 23 is actually 23.90 which is what bluray use's natively, whereas 24 is absolute 24hz, same for 59vs60, 59 is the 59.6 or whatever it is that TV's actually use instead of an absolute 60hz, Using 24/60 can cause issues also.

[Marc_G 92]

Yeah, there's some weird stuff in there. I found much better results by turning off motion smoothing and all the ATI crud... my frequencies are matched (I think) and the only challenge I've got is how to make WMC output the full image properly. If I can't solve it I will have to use MPC-HC or other external player for stuff where it matters. It seems I'm not alone with this problem:

 

http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6213

 

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1496274/help-wmc-not-outputting-rightmost-column-of-pixels

[JeremyFr79 228]

Yeah, there's some weird stuff in there. I found much better results by turning off motion smoothing and all the ATI crud... my frequencies are matched (I think) and the only challenge I've got is how to make WMC output the full image properly. If I can't solve it I will have to use MPC-HC or other external player for stuff where it matters. It seems I'm not alone with this problem:

 

http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6213

 

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1496274/help-wmc-not-outputting-rightmost-column-of-pixels

You could try playing with these in your registry....

 

 

Enable Overscan

• Some televisions do not display the full Media Center user experience. Do you want Media Center to pull in critical UI elements?

Registry key – HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings

Registry value – marginSaved

Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

Registry value data – 1 = enable overscan; 0 = disable overscan

Bottom Margin

• How many units should Media Center pull in critical elements from the bottom of the screen?

Registry key – HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings

Registry value – marginBottom

Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

Top Margin

• How many units should Media Center pull in critical elements from the top of the screen?

Registry key – HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings

Registry value – marginTop

Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

Right Margin

• How many units should Media Center pull in critical elements from the right side of the screen?

Registry key – HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings

Registry value – marginRight

Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

Left Margin

• How many units should Media Center pull in critical elements from the left side of the screen?

Registry key – HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings

Registry value – marginLeft

Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

[Marc_G 92]

Thanks Jeremy. Turns out the margin settings are for the UI elements, not the video.

 

A post here I found what are supposed to be the logical and physical width, but so far messing with these still hasn't totally fixed it. It seems WMC is hardwired to mess up pixel matching.   MPC-HC is looking better and better the longer this goes on!

[JeremyFr79 228]

Thanks Jeremy. Turns out the margin settings are for the UI elements, not the video.

 

A post here I found what are supposed to be the logical and physical width, but so far messing with these still hasn't totally fixed it. It seems WMC is hardwired to mess up pixel matching.   MPC-HC is looking better and better the longer this goes on!

That's so very odd, I don't have this issue on any of my displays even on my laptops, hmmm dunno what to tell ya on that one.

[JeremyFr79 228]

have you made sure in the ATI controls that scaling is set use panel scaling or whatever the setting is?

[Marc_G 92]

have you made sure in the ATI controls that scaling is set use panel scaling or whatever the setting is?

 

Yup. No scaling on ATI's end, and nothing else shows the out-of-scale that WMC is showing. Desktop is perfectly aligned to the panel, MPC-HC perfectly aligned, TMT5 perfectly aligned, WMP perfectly aligned... only WMC is off...

[JeremyFr79 228]

Yup. No scaling on ATI's end, and nothing else shows the out-of-scale that WMC is showing. Desktop is perfectly aligned to the panel, MPC-HC perfectly aligned, TMT5 perfectly aligned, WMP perfectly aligned... only WMC is off...

consider me stumped! lol

[Marc_G 92]

Jeremy, would you be willing to download this test pattern and take a look at it in WMC and some other player, and compare? The white outer line should be present all the way around. On the other boards, it seems anyone who does a detailed test seems to find the problem cropping up.

 

http://www.ge.tt/30qOwZY/v/0

 

It's becoming hard to find anyone who isn't seeing it, though many didn't notice it until I raked the muck.

 

Marc

[JeremyFr79 228]

So on my Laptop with Intel HD4400 I lose the right hand side, on my Xbox360 I lose the right and top white line oddly enough, didn't even bother on my other 2 systems since it's obviously not an issue based on video card. 1 line of pixels isnt' enough to bother me though, it doesn't appear that its not scaling correctly but as though it's just dropping that last line of pixels for some reason.

[Marc_G 92]

Thanks for the help investigating this.

 

On mine, the scaling artifacts caused by this one silly pixel line are visible in some situations, and there's an overall clarity loss, so I've moved to using MPC-HC as an external player. It's looking beautiful, thought I get a bit nervous having an extra piece of software that has to work. It's the "WAF" risk involved that concerns me.

 

So, to cap things off for the thread, for anyone interested:

 

On my TV I've left / turned all the ATI enhancements off, have the pixel format to RBG limited 4:4:4, no scaling. On the TV I turned on pixel direct matching, turned off pixel orbiter, turned off motion smoothing, and mostly left the TV settings alone otherwise. On my Panny screen, I'm using the Cinema settings, with mild adjustments to contrast and brightness.

 

Marc