I’m sure others will be using ReClock but I could find no mention on the forum so thought I’d provide a post on this great little filter!
Background - After playing around with my filter selections I was 95% happy with the quality of my Video Output but still had some Video Jitter. This was especially noticeable on pans and constant moving areas like a "Ticker" running at the bottom of the screen and in particular with my Home DV (in AVI containers). The jitter was not bad but for me it was distracting and would pull me out of enjoying the show.
My Config – As outlined in a previous post, I use a NVIDIA 6200TC with DVI out to the HDMI on a Yami V2700 then HDMI to a Hitachi Plasma. Sound is S/PDIF from the sound card to the V2700 with the following additionally installed direct show filters:
- Nero File Source (Async) - manually selected under "Source Filter"
- Nero Splitter - manually selected under "Other Filter"
- NVIDIA Video Decoder - manually selected under "Other Filter"
- FFDSHOW Audio Decoder - gets automatically selected
ReClock - After some searching and playing with options, I found a simple solution at
http://reclock.free.fr/ that worked me! It replaces the "Default Direct Sound Device" filter with its own and according to the very thorough doco removes the Jitter by adjusting and providing a common sync signal between the selected refresh rate of the video card and the media being played.
So in my configuration - I set my Video Card to 1280x720p@50hz (PAL for us down under) and now all my PAL (25/50fps) media (DVD / MPG / AVI & DVB-T Broadcasts) plays perfectly Jitter Free
and for the first time is indistinguishable to CE devices!
Limitations – ReClock needs the refresh rate of your card to be the same or a multiple (eg I could of used 50, 75 or 100hz) of the frame rate the media you are playing to sync it up and remove the jitter. Now like most people I have a mix of 24/25/29.97/30fps (but by far the most is PAL 25fps material) so the sync is only working on my PAL stuff.
Feature Enhancement Idea – MC is unique in letting you watch Video’s in either “Desktop Resolution” or lets you pick a specific one (I don’t use this function as the HDMI Sync process takes a few seconds and can sometime fail (very annoying) – also the available resolutions are NTSC focused with no current choices for PAL Resolutions or Frame Rates like 576i/p@50hz, 720p@50hz etc). However if this feature was tweaked so that there was another option or checkbox added such as “Set Output to Source Frame Rate” (not does not need to change resolution just frame rate) then ReClock would work each time.
Issue – The only problem I now have is the NVIDA drivers keep defaulting to 60Hz whenever I try to enable overscan compensation or full 1280x720 when I select 50Hz……more playing to come
Nathan