# My 3D HTPC experience



## ghost rider (Dec 29, 2010)

These are some of my problems and my semi-solutions. No solution is not with new issues. No one setting will work for all movies. I posted this hoping other more experienced PC users could give suggestions on how to solve these issues and if 100% perfect PC playback is not possible it today’s world of flat screen monitors, well let me know that. Perhaps I should not expect perfect playback.

Actually I have had a HTPC for years. I recently bought a Panny 55GT30 plasma TV upgrading from a 2002 Mits ws55819 RPTV. The CRT 1080i @ 30 Hz seemed to be far less problematic. The video motion for the most part was always smooth never jerky.

This set is 3D so naturally I have to get a new player. I got PDVD 11. Then my OB ati 4200 graphics needed upgrading. It took some research to find out that the 3D standard is HDMI 1.4a and as far as ATI/AMD only the 6xxx or higher series is. When I ordered my 1st HD6770 and popped it in no videos would play smooth and PDVD 11 would not even work some windows is closing the program error. So I spent a week returning and ordering new cards. I ended up with a Sapphire HD 6770 with 1g of GDDR5. It also had the error. So I restored an image backup from last April and it still had the error. (By the way Sapphire is one of the few manufactures that actually state that their 6xxx cards are HDMI 1.4a.) Apparently I had a deep seeded problem with my windows installation. I did a complete restore from the ground up and this time PDVD 11 worked.

There are still many issues, some movies play fine some movies are a little jerky and reclock helps , some movies reclock makes it a little jerky. Some of my backups won’t play smooth at all in PDVD 11 but are nearly smooth in TMT3 w/o reclock. The worst ones are my old HDdvds that I converted to BD.

If I play a 3D movie I have to unplug my 26in equipment room monitor because it can only drive one monitor in 3D and that can create issues if I don’t reconnect it in the proper order. PDVD 11 doesn’t like reclock when playing 3D movies.

Also if I use reclock in PDVD 11 I have to completely close PDVD 11 to play a different movie. If I don’t I get a ran out of memory error and the program has to closed anyway. If I don’t use reclock I can switch movies all day long.

The glasses are not without issue either. I ordered the SainSonic 3D Rechargeable for Panasonic. They got good reviews. They seem to work pretty well but initially I had problems understanding how to sync them up with the TV. The instructions are poor. One may have a bad battery. The instructions say they last for 50 hours from a 3 hour charge. I’ve charged them twice and it takes barely ½ hour for them to become fully charged. They may have been pre-charged and not dead but out of sync last night when I thought the one went dead. Right now I’m just playing a movie (2D-3D) and leaving both pair out and active to try and test the batteries. I would like to know sooner than latter if they are bad.


I would great appreciate any comments experience as well as solutions.


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## vann_d (Apr 7, 2009)

i wish could help but I haven't tried 3D yet. Anyway, here are my ideas:



Make sure on-board card is disabled in BIOS
Set graphics output to your plasma's native refresh rate or a multiple of (like 1/2, 1/4)
Make sure hardware acceleration is turned on in PDVD
Use cinema mode on PDVD (I've had better picture using this option)
Sorry, these are pretty basic but maybe you've not tried some of them. I use PDVD 11 w/ BD and experience is good but I'm outputting 1080i 30Hz...


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## hgoed (Mar 22, 2010)

I read your post and got a little confused. When you're talking about jerky movie playback, are you talking about 3D movies or does this happen with regular flicks too? Are you playing straight off of the physical media or are you using ripped files? Also, for 3D, is the material natively 3D or are you using the software to make it 3D?

Do give you a little something other than a barrage of questions, I've not been able to play any interpolated 3D without glitches. This goes for my computer (using HD6970 card and PowerDVD11) and for my dedicated blu-ray player. Even ignoring the glitches, the effect was marginal at best.

You may want to watch the 3D without the glasses just to make sure that the glitches are from the source rather than a L-R frame first or other discrepancy between the source and the display. 

I have yet to watch a 3D-BluRay on my computer--I never sent in for my 3D Avatar disc which came free with the Blu-Ray player, but I wish I had so I could see how everything works.


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## ghost rider (Dec 29, 2010)

Thanks Guys,

I have since figured out some of this. Now I’m getting very good playback with reg BD movies. I did go in and disable the OBG and that may have helped. 

When I was referring to jerky I meant, well before I figured out my copy of windows was whacked it was so bad, pdvd 11 was so jerky it was not watch able. Now what I was referring to is every so often the motion kind of hesitates. This seems to be only on a few movies. The pdvd 11 true theater motion setting did seem to help but the picture was slightly degraded. 

Reclock seems to help a lot and with no picture degrading. The error I was getting from switching movies was from pdvd its security issue. So when using reclock with pdvd 11 its normal to have to close pdvd to load a new movie,

The 3D I only have 1 and it was pretty cool. 2d to 3d is a waste of time. I just have to unplug my primary monitor to have enough resources to send a 3d picture to my HT monitor. The one pair of glasses may have been a glitch. On Sunday I played a movie in a continuous loop (2d to 3d) for 6+ hours and they seemed to work. I think it was a sync issue.

I apologize if my writing is somewhat unclear. My typing is very bad and I frequently get tire and rush the completion.
:bigsmile:


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## Jasonpctech (Apr 20, 2010)

Just for giggles go try the Jriver MC they have a long trial. I bet any jerky video issues will end.


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