Confused by MPEG-4 scaling in MPC

[wmansfield]

I've been using Media Player Classic for a while to view movies, but have noticed that it seems to have a fairly weak scaler. If I use Nero Showtime the video output seems to be cleaner/less blocky. I'm not sure if MPC is using its own scaler or if it's drawing on something else for scaling, but whichever is in use seems to suck. Does anyone know enough about MPC to tell me if there is anything I can do, or do I need to look at using something else?

 

[DaveSimmons]

This seems obvious, but did you try playing the exact same file with both, to make sure the difference isn't really caused by the files you play?

 

[wmansfield]

Uh, yeah, I've compared a few different movies and Nero Showtime always seems a little smoother than MPC.

 

[sunase]

If you are using MPC's VMR output, you can pick the resizing algorithm in the options. It has all the usual suspects: nearest neighbor, bilinear, and various sharpness bicubic algorithms. Overlay output might use the video card's resizing, so would be impossible to control, but I'm just guessing there.

I don't think I've ever used any of those anyway, though, since resizing in software seems kind of stupid. Just drop the full screen resolution down to match the video (and do a whole number zoom if its still too small). With a CRT you get an analog resize that way. Modern LCDs also look really nice doing this, I almost suspect they take advantage of subpixel rendering or something to do non-native resolution nowadays. Regardless, it leaves more CPU for doing all the playback filtering modern codecs are capable of (DivX has automatic control of this and does less if your CPU is pegged, etc.).

 

[wmansfield]

I used the nvidia tools to make custom resolutions of 704x440, 720x450, 1408x880, and 1440x900 to fit my 24" HP/Sony widescreen CRT. Definitely makes a huge difference if you set the width of the screen to the same width of the file (99% of my movies are 704x304 or 704x384). I tried the quad pixel settings (1408 and 1440) and can still see some chunkiness in the images. Sorry to seem dense, I didn't really think of that until I noticed MPC has a full screen resolution change option.

What is Overlay and VMR? I looked up overlay online and get very vague info. I'm currently set to VMR 9 Windowless I believe.

 

[wmansfield]

Correction - I'm using VMR9 Windowed, if I try to use VMR9 Renderless MPC crashes every time I try to open a file. From what I see you need VMR9 Renderless in order to render it as a 3D image and have access to anti-aliasing.

Update 2 - I downloaded the latest DirectX 9 SDK per the MPC author's tip. Got VMR9 Renderless working with 3D and full anti-aliasing and all I can say is HOLY ******. I've been watching these movies scaled badly and not using any anti-aliasing for a long long time and had no idea what I was missing!!!!