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Old 9th April 2009, 15:09   #51  |  Link
TinTime
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: UK
Posts: 403
My first impressions...

Testing
I thought the best way to test madVR would be to sit down and watch a movie all the way through, rather than trying lots of different clips.

Hardware
Athlon X2 5000, Nvidia 8600GT (512MB) feeding 1080p plasma telly (DVI to HDMI) at 24Hz (23.998Hz according to ReClock).

Software
Win XP SP3, Zoom Player, CoreAVC with CUDA enabled, ReClock in S/PDIF passthrough mode. Er, and madVR

Source file
mkv ("Revenge of the Sith" if anyone cares), 1024x576 h264, DTS audio. Encode from a PAL DVD but a/v slowed to 23.998Hz (prior to playback) to match my refresh rate as reported by ReClock.

Installation
No problems here - worked as advertised, but I guess those having difficulties were using Vista.

Playback
Initial brightness levels were off for me so there was a brief interlude where I went from "What on earth is cr3dlut?" to generating a new 3D LUT (PAL DVD to RGB Video)
I then watched the film. As I said above the source file frame rate matches the display refresh rate.
So after 2hrs+ I'm happy to report that playback was smooth for me - no stuttering, no tearing. General image quality is as good as I've ever seen, although I need to calibrate my display or play around with different 3D LUTs to get the levels correct (low blacks are currently too bright). EDIT - changed output format from sRGB to Blu-ray and this sorted it. I need to read up on cr3dlut. If I use VMR9 or Haali at 24Hz (but not 50Hz or 60Hz) I get occasional tearing and stuttering when I first start playback which can be fixed by pausing the video. This never happened with madVR. Not bad for v0.1 beta
No problems either running madVR and CoreAVC CUDA at the same time, although I haven't tried any HD video yet.
STaRGaZeR mentioned weirdness when going from windowed to fullscreen. When I do this there is a split second where the windowed image is displayed within the fullscreen image - I think. It is for a split second so it's kind of hard to tell, and not a problem as far as I'm concerned unless it's a symptom of a bigger issue.

Conclusions
Very impressive and no problems for me on my system so far. I went on a bit of a clicking frenzy, trying all the resizers and turning performance options on and off at random, and none of the settings caused any crash.
And so to the inevitable feature request... In the future you mentioned adding support for user switching between 3D LUTs. I have absolutely no idea whether this is possible or not, but what would seem to be ideal for playback purposes would be to flag mkv files somehow to indicate to madVR which 3D LUT to use when playing it back. Perhaps the appropriate LUT could be attached to the mkv and madVR would load it from there? That's for further down the line anyway.

So that's it for now - another quality product

Last edited by TinTime; 9th April 2009 at 15:38.
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