Avivo Advanced Settings

[Mr.M]

Over at the AVS forums a number of people are complaining, including myself, about the lack of AVIVO control settings.

We've opened tickets with ATI, but the responses have been ridiculously poor.

Basically the drivers are missing two fundamental features:

1. Noise Reduction Control, by default the AVIVO suite performs a ridiculous amount of noise reduction smudging the picture hideously
2. Edge Enhancement Control, by default the AVIVO suite enhances the edges of the picture often worsening the picture quality.

There's a registry workaround (creating a TRDenoise registry key) to disable number 1, but this only works in XP and not in Vista. ATI have shown no interest in releasing information of how to do it in Vista. With regards to edge enhancement they have shown no interest in either OS.

So, is there any way that these features are within the driver settings somewhere and registry fixes can be found? Or do we have to simply hope in vein that ATI will respond to the complaints and implement changes?

This situation is incredibly frustrating, the ATI video hardware is fantastic, but the drivers are a bad joke.

[CX23882-19]

Hi,
The settings located under under HKEY_L_M\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Video\{xxx..xxx}\000x\UMD\DXVA in the Registry for Vista drivers
appear to take effect, but the problem is in finding a value which disables temporal denoise. So far I have only been able to use "Denoise" to increase the temporal denoise even further. If someone could find out the range of valid values from ATI it would solve the problem. There appear to be a few other settings in there, such as tweaks for the LCD panel compensation, contrast enhancement etc

[Mr.M]

Thanks for the response, that's better than better than I dared hope for!

At least we've found the setting now, so we're one step closer.

Does anyone out there know/could work out the range of values?

[dagabs]

These problems have been around for ages since 5.9 . I've been trying to get good DVD quality for about 3 years now out of my system. Bought a Nvidia 6800 GT for its purevideo technology, to find out later that there broken and don't work. So a year and 1/2 later I got a X1900XT, not because of just its gaming performance, but for its AVIVO features, then to find out that it smears the images in the DVD's.

Apparently ATI said they fixed it, which I believe they did. I think it was drivers 6.8 with the appropriate PowerDVD version. But I can't get this combination to work anymore.

So sorry to ATI, but my next buy is back to Nvidia.

Good luck getting them to include denoise and edge enhancement control settings. By the time they include, I'll probably will have a new card, which I'm planning to get by Christmas. I pretty much gave up hope.

[spyre]

I asked ATI to take a look at making these features end user accessable, doesnt mean they will though.

[sharangad]

Originally Posted by CX23882-19

Hi,
The settings located under under HKEY_L_M\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Video\{xxx..xxx}\000x\UMD\DXVA in the Registry for Vista drivers
appear to take effect, but the problem is in finding a value which disables temporal denoise. So far I have only been able to use "Denoise" to increase the temporal denoise even further. If someone could find out the range of valid values from ATI it would solve the problem. There appear to be a few other settings in there, such as tweaks for the LCD panel compensation, contrast enhancement etc

Try setting this value to -100. ATi AVIVO controls generally range from -100 to 100 with 0 being the default value.

[Mr.M]

Thanks Spyre I really appreciate that. I've opened a ticket with ATI on the edge enhancement issue and didn't really make any ground. Other people have been in touch about the noise reduction issue and ATI have basically stated they're not interested.

I haven't got Vista running on my PC, this whole issue has kept me glued to XP unfortunately. So hopefully people out there can test these settings.

Dagabs: Don't be too hasty. Nvidia's offering has even worse problems. I bought a Geforce 7600 and installed in a PC for someone else, I couldn't get it to playback video (ie interlaced broadcast) material without horrendous tearing. There are major problems throughout the Geforce line in this department.

This is precisely why I find the lack of these options incredibly irritating. Nvidia have really messed up Purevideo, ATI should be making the most of this.

[H8Red]

I am too struggeling in the umd\dxva keys to find the best possible settings.
Downloaded Ati tray Tools, but I cant seem to get it right..

Going to try and put -100 for the denoise, hopefully it will have some effect.

Thought I had something going with DI_METHOD but I cant seem to nail it ...

[spyre]

The ATI peeps I have spoken to are quite happy to look at this, as they seem to take the DVD quality seriously. The normal tickets that end users make dont usually get past the Tier 1 helpdesk people where as I can have direct access to the people who actually get things done since im a beta tester.

BUT I need help on this , i am not a DVD / picture expert

I need handy things like ....

Pick some sort of DVD movie that will show off the issue best (hopefully not something obscure that I've never heard of so maybe a popular movie) and then I need

A) Before and after shots with with registry values altered (well the alterable ones that is) to show the quality difference

B) Shots of what good edge enhancement should look like and that sort of thing.

C) if you really wanted to push the boat out then screen captured movie clips with FRAPS or whatever showing the visual differences (they only need to be a few seconds long each I guess)

Without it, it will be hard to explain just using words what the issues are.

Get the AVS peeps to help if you can.

[Mr.M]

Thanks yet again.

The overwhelming consensus is that we simply want control over these settings. And it's something that ATI should be very easily able to add, at least for the noise reduction.

Unfortunately the shots highlighting the noise reduction have gone. But I've asked them to get the shots back, and given them a url to this thread. I'll work on my own caps as well on this.

This shows the edge enhancement problem:
AVIVO Edge Enhancement:

MPEG2 source (Software Decoding):

[CX23882-19]

These show the temporal denoise (gamma increased to exagerate the errors):



As far as I can tell, you will never see the denoise problems with a film-sourced DVD. The problem is readily apparent when using TV/Video-sourced material (which requires deinterlacing), such as OTA DVB-t broadcasts, or DVDs of TV shows. It's almost as if the interlacing artefacts (before deinterlacing) are detected as noise.

[spyre]

Well good news.

There will be a facility to disable the the Edge sharpness in the CCC, unfortunately I can't give an ETA. I have a rough guideline but I wouldnt want to disapoint anyone if it doesnt make it. Also I am under NDA so cant say etc.

Heres a quote from my email regarding noise reduction.

You are able to disable the noise reduction and detail enhancement features of AVIVO under Vista, by using the keys below. In addition, these features are only enabled when the de-interlacing mode is selected as motion adaptive or better. Thus enabling bob or weave would also disable these features.

STRING “TRDenoise” = 0

STRING "DXVA_DetailEnhance" = 0

So the question is next, does the above conform to your results or is the TRDenoise thing not working regardless of the method of de-interlacing? ... if so let me know and I can get them to look at it.

[StephaneM93]

Originally Posted by spyre

STRING “TRDenoise” = 0

STRING "DXVA_DetailEnhance" = 0

Where are we supposed to put those values? Under 0000 & 0001 or 0000\UMD or 0000\UMD\DXVA

And I want to know why the support team on ATI\AMD site is not able to tell his costumer this information at all (the clearly said to me in response to my ticket that ATI\AMD had no intention to resolve this problem at all and that I should deactive deinterlacing...)

This problem exists since Catalyst 5.13 (on X1K Radeon series) it is about time to get this resolved.

I'm willing to test this fully on Vista and XP if needed because it's really a shame as those Radeon does have a great video quality otherwise.

Also I can confirm that this can only be seen on interlaced video content (for the noise reduction problem), so if you want a DVD that does have the problem I have a very good one for you to test : this is a double episode of CSI (Las Vegas), the one when Stocke is burried alive. The very first sequence when Stocke discover the crime scene is a "festival" of ghosting artifacts (I guess you need to have the PAL version of this DVD).

Regards,
Stéphane.

[spyre]

Not sure where in the registry, I guess it wouldnt hurt to put it in all of them and see if it works first of all, then narrow it down.

As I said before very often the Tier 1 helpdesk dont usually know what they are on about, same for any organisations helpdesk really. I've worked on various support helpdesks at tier 1, 2 and 3 levels so I know what its like. I havent worked for ATI but I can draw conclusions based on what I've seen over the years.

[StephaneM93]

Originally Posted by spyre

Not sure where in the registry, I guess it wouldnt hurt to put it in all of them and see if it works first of all.

It seems to work under UMD\DXVA, and there is no need to reboot, just close and restart the video player (at least for the TRDenoise Value)

As I said before very often the Tier 1 helpdesk dont usually know what they are on about, same for any organisations helpdesk really. I've worked on various support helpdesks at tier 1, 2 and 3 levels so I know what its like.

It's pretty usual also to have a procedure known as escalation... So I guess that not enough users have contacted the support to escalate this problem, and I really wonder how it is possible :

* either users don't use their Radeon X1K for MPEG2 video playback
* either users don't use DXVA but some FFDShow / DScaler combination to play interlaced MPEG2 videos
* either users are blind

Because, trust me on this, most PAL MPEG2 interlaced video content is unwatchable with this temporal noise reduction.

Anyway, huge thanks for letting us know that the TRDenoise was still working.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[griffy]

I'm getting the exact same behaviour in Vista MCE with Live & Recorded TV. I currently have an open call with ATI's helpdesk, but they have proven to be completely useless in even comprehending the problem. All they ever want me to do is run the ATI Diagnostic tool and send them the info. For whatever reason it can't gather all the information required on my MCE box so they are saying there is something wrong with the O/S. It couldn't possibly be their tool which is dated from 2004!

Even with a clean install of Vista, and it being the very first thing I run, I still get incomplete results. (can't even tell me Video Card BIOS and driver version)

I have sent them screenshots showing the god awful blurring and they can't comprehend the issue (shaved monkeys maybe?), install latest drivers, run tool, rinse repeat.

It will be great if we can discover some registry settings that can help with image quality, I'm sick of my TV looking like a really bad Divx all the time.

Cheers

[Mr.M]

This is better than I possibly could have hoped for, after months with this problem getting no closer to resolution.

We now appear to have a registry fix for Vista, and an edge enhancement change on the way. Thanks so much Spyre, you helped when all else seemed to have failed.

One final thing, could you clarify with ATI how to disable edge enhancement in XP? That's the only key we're missing now. The TRDenoise Fix for XP is a dword value, rather than a string. I'm just going to experiment now, I'll post if I find a definitive answer.

[Mr.M]

I've tried several different versions of DXVA_DetailEnhance without success in XP now. So if someone finds a solution do speak!

[spyre]

The keys I posted above were aimed at Vista only as mentioned in the post, I didnt ask about XP as I no longer use that OS.

I'll ask about the XP registry key, and let you know what I find out.

@ StephaneM93

It takes lots of people reporting an issue before it will get escalated higher up, hardly anyone bothers to report a problem however they usually just rather like complaining on forums about it instead (intended as a general comment, not directed at anyone in this thread)

[griffy]

I don't have that registry path in both my installs of Vista

Under the following key.....

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

I do not have a Video Key, to get to the video key I had to go here

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{42ADC3D3-7E48-43E5-9773-5B40D7E7DA70}\0000\UMD\DXVA

I assume the original post was a typo ?? or am I just unique ?

Cheers

[Mr.M]

Well I tried to get it going with Vista to check out the registry settings, but I can't get AVIVO to work at all.

On auto-detect deinterlacing PowerDVD just seems to do software deinterlacing. On the other modes, I get a black screen. Although in those modes AVIVO is definitely working because it forces PowerDVD to switch off Aero.

Media Center will not budge from the Microsoft decoder, despite the fact that I used the Decoder Facility to select the Cyberlink decoder.

CX23882-19 if you could provide some pointers I'd really appreciate that.

It's no surprise this got no tickets, it's like taking a PhD dealing with this area most of the time.

[StephaneM93]

Originally Posted by Mr.M

Well I tried to get it going with Vista to check out the registry settings, but I can't get AVIVO to work at all.

It can be tricky. What should work is the default Microsoft MPEG2 decoder with Windows Media Player or Media Center. This decoder does support Hardware acceleration (and will follow any changes mades to the AVIVO Video Quality)

On auto-detect deinterlacing PowerDVD just seems to do software deinterlacing. On the other modes, I get a black screen. Although in those modes AVIVO is definitely working because it forces PowerDVD to switch off Aero.

If Areo is dropped out, this is because PowerDVD is using the Overlay. As my version of PowerDVD is not doing this, be sure to run the correct version of PowerDVD that is Vista Compatible.

Also from my own experience, if the PowerDVD decoder is used as the default MPEG2 decoder in Windows Media Player or Media Center : hardware acceleration will be disabled (I guess this is the way it should be because of the new way of handling DXVA in Vista, and if I'm not wrong this is called EVR)

Anyway the decoder you'll want to use is the Microsoft decoder. It works as it should with Hardware acceleration.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[Mr.M]

It's as simple as that? I'll give it another go. Thanks!

[spyre]

Its the same DXVA_DetailEnhance regisitry setting (not sure if its a string or Dword as they didnt say) under XP according to ATI, but you will need to reboot for the change to take effect or at least change the resolution displayed so that the driver restarts and reads the new setting as the XP display driver is more limited.

[Mr.M]

Fantastic that's it then. We have registry fixes for each of the problems in XP and Vista now.

I've switched to the default driver as you recommended, Stephane. You're quite right the hardware decoding is working, but I'm getting a hell of a lot of judder/dropped frames. Tickers on news channels are horrendous. Have you got any suggestions on this? I'm at 50Hz with Powerstrip, as I am in XP MCE and I don't have any judder there with the Cyberlink decoder.

[griffy]

I have applied the two registry entries on my Vista Media Center and the difference in picture quality is amazing, the dreaded persistent image/ghosting/shadowing has completely gone.. YAY

I have noticed the picture has a bit more 'grain' to it now, I have yet to try different values, are the limits -100 to +100 ?

And if so, what did these two settings default to without the registry entries setting them to zero ?

Cheers

[dagabs]

Originally Posted by Mr.M

Dagabs: Don't be too hasty. Nvidia's offering has even worse problems. I bought a Geforce 7600 and installed in a PC for someone else, I couldn't get it to playback video (ie interlaced broadcast) material without horrendous tearing. There are major problems throughout the Geforce line in this department.

This is precisely why I find the lack of these options incredibly irritating. Nvidia have really messed up Purevideo, ATI should be making the most of this.

I didn't know that, thanks for the heads up. I guess you only discover problems once you have the products.