16:9 Enhancements

[CiNcH]

Hi,

 

There are two little problems that become apparent with my 16:9 HD projector. It's connected to the graphics card's DVI output at 1280 x 720 resolution.

 

 

The swiss seem to be using a bad MPEG encoder (problems become apparend on ProSiebenSat.1 Swiss and SF). There are some flickering lines in the overscan area (more information). Problem is that zooming does not do the trick for a 16:9 screen as when displaying 4:3 content there is no overscan area to the left and to the right. Cropping would be a great solution, though this can most probably only be solved with a DirectShow PostProcessor. Guess VMR does not provide such functionality?

Unfortunately ffdshow does not work for me as a PostProcessor and when using it as MPEG-2 decoder and PostProcessor cropping doesn't do the trick either, either I don't get how to get it working properly (though I do not know what can be misunderstood in the cropping dialog) or something is wrong with it in the latest builds. Weird behaviour...

Any ideas on this are welcome.

 

 

Second problem is with letterboxed transmissions. I always zoom to full screen size so that the actual picture fits. I would suggest the possibility of defining zoom profiles and easy switching between them (via SendMessage and/or keyboard shortcut) for usability reasons. For example:

 

Standard/Anamorph: Pan & Scan value 10 (overscan top/bottom)

Letterboxed: Pan & Scan value 70

 

Cool would of course be an automatic detection and correction but this would require serious intervention in the DirectShow filter graph too (crop and resize).

Edited October 9, 2006 by CiNcH

[Griga]

The swiss seem to be using a bad MPEG encoder (problems become apparend on ProSiebenSat.1 Swiss and SF). There are some flickering lines in the overscan area

No, they do it purposely. The lines are used for broadcasting additional information. Search the web for "Swisscom" and "Betty"

[CiNcH]

Aha, using blanking interval in an analog transmission for other things but teletext is cool an nice, we have seen that with r@dio.mp3 and MEGARADIO. Using lines above and below the picture would be fine too, but parts of the lines to the left and to the right? Does not make sense in the digital era anyway. This will most likely disappear with analog broadcasting.

 

Point is, that it is really ugly and disturbing on a 16:9 screen.

Edited October 9, 2006 by CiNcH

[CiNcH]

Oh guys, I find out something new about this software with every day. The recall functionality already remembers zoom values. It's possible to store 4 different zooms. Assigning a name to them and displaying the name when switching would be cool.

 

Think Betty won't be encoded within the video when they switch off analog transmission, so never mind about that too..