Powerstrip settings for Radeon 9000 -> Pioneer 643HD5 (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Peake]

I am a complete rookie to HTPC.

I have powerstrip, a Radeon 9000Pro with latest drivers and a Pioneer 643HD HDTV (connecting via the Pioneers RGB input).

I have 848x480p working well for DVD playback and PC Desktop.

I cant quite get 1080i working. Using the built in Powerstrip settings for 1920x1080i gives me very bad shimmering...text looks very bad. What timings should I be using?


To all the HTPC gurus out there, what settings work the best for DVD playback???? Can I hope to get 1080i working for highest picture quality? Will 848x480p be better that than?


Thanks

Jeff

 

[Masood Ali]

Have you tried AVSForum yet? They breathe this kind of stuff.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Jeff,

Have you tried adjusting the refresh rate of 1080i? As far as shimmering- does it do this on DVD- or just on the desktop? Lots of times text will look crappy on an interlaced resolution-- but DVD playback looks decent.

Does your set support 720P? What are you using as playback software?

-Vince

 

[Jeff Peake]

Vince:

My set does not do 720p.

I have tried tweaking the timings and refresh at 1080i and havent found anything that makes the desktop look good.

I am using Theatertek 1.5.15 as the software DVD player.

After doing more research at AVSForum, it seems that running at 480p or 540p is the prefered resolution for DVD playback anyway. And that running horizontal resolution in multiples of 720 lines is best to reduce scaling artifacts.

So I have good results running at 1440x480p (couldnt see much of a difference with 1440x540p in DVD playback, but at 540 the windows desktop doesnt fit the screen so I am sticking with 480).

What I noticed is at 1920x1080i, windows desktop was about 2 times taller than was displayed! So what does that mean for playing DVD's??? If I manually adjust the size of the image using TT's "aspect ratio" settings, and get it to fill the screen, will it actually be running with 1080 interlaced lines????

I am confused as to how all the resolution/timing settings work in powerstrip, and how the desktop resolution affects teh video overlay resolution.....