Poor Video Quality Compared to old Nvidia ION Card

[EStra2]

Hi,

I recently bought an Intel NUC D34010WYK to replace my old Asrock ION Atom 330-HT HTPC. Most of the time i use my HTPC to watch Live and recorded TV through Windows Media Center in Windows 8.1 Pro. I have run Media Center with excellent picture quality for 5 years on my ION based system.

But when I compare the picture quality in Media Center on my new NUC to my old ION based HTPC I see a huge Video quality drop. There is much more noise and pixelation on the nuc. When watching movies with fog and mist you can clearly see more noise on the nuc compared to the Asrock. When I watch SD interlaced channels I can see the interlace stripes on my NUC, but not on my Asrock. Its like deinterlacing is not working as it should.

As you know WMC is built upon Windows Media Foundation, and totally relies on the DXVA2/DXVAHD implementation. So there is no codec tweak I can do. And on my Asrock it's woking Awesome out of the box. The picture is generally more smooth and with less noise on the Asrock compared to the NUC. I guess the quality difference between the 2 hardware setup is due to different implementation of video upscaling method and deinterlace method since all post processing settings on TV and on both HTPCs (Nvidia PureVideo compared to Intel ICV HD) are turned off.

I have tested all Video post processing settings in Intel control panel including noice filters, but it always end up with that the quality looks best with "let program decide"

The video broadcast video standard where i live in Sweden is:

720p50 or 720p25 or 576i50 or 576p25

H.264/AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10 with Variable BitRate (VBR) between 4 and 16 Mbit/s

Both my HTPCs runs on a Clean install of Windows 8.1 Pro x64 With Media Center. When I did the comparsion test i played the same recorded TV file and both system hooked up to the same LG TV running at 1080p@50hz.

My question is:

Does Windows Media Foundation (Used by WMC, WMP, Win8-Apps, Silverlight etc) utilize the best scaling and deinterlacing methods from ICV HD?

If not - How can I configure my NUC to do so!?

At this point I'm really disappointed about the video playback quality...

Here is 2 screen dumps from the same video played in WMP on my both systems. Note the difference of the pxielation on the left mans costume and face especially, much smother on the ION system. I can upload more screen dumps if wanted to do more comparsion. I also attached my NUCS DxDiag

Intel NUC screen dump:

Asrock ION 330-HT screen dump:

[EStra2]

OK,

After some more investigation I figured out that my 5 year old Nvidia ION card supports anti aliasing (through DXVA) when upscaling movies/videos to full screen. It really looks great and explain the difference in the two screenshots above.

So my question is:

How do I enable anti aliasing on video playback (Through Windows Media Foundation) on my NUC with Intel HD 4400 Graphics??

This is a dealbreaker for me as in my opinion upscaling of video contents looks awful without anti aliasing feature enabled. If I can't activate this feature on my NUC, I will probably sell it and by another HTPC that can handle this.

Edit:

Here is an link (from 2004!) how this is done on Nvidia PureVideo. How do enable equivalent feature on Intel HD graphics!?

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-PureVideo-Technology?aid=102 NVIDIA PureVideo Technology | PC Perspective

Edit again:

Make sure you read the whole test, look at test part 2. This is exactly the difference I see between running video on my NUC compared to my old Nvidia system:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-PureVideo-Technology/More-PureVideo-Features NVIDIA PureVideo Technology | More PureVideo Features

[Kevin_M_Intel]

Hi beachman,

I am sorry to hear you are having problems but let me help you.

The Anti-Aliasing is supported in our controllers since Sandy Bridge controller but it is enabled by default meaning that there is no option at this point to enable it or disable it.

I recommend you installing the latest graphics driver for your controller that can be downloaded at the following link:

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23405 https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23405

[EStra2]

An update on this.

It turned out that my LG TV for some reason changed the contrast setting to 90% on the TV when I plugged in my NUC. When I changed the contrast setting back on my TV the video quality looks excellent on my NUC.

Sorry for blaming the NUC for this and taking your expensive time .