Posts by Pokey

  • Media playback quality .. Internal HDD vs NAS Stream

    I put a spare WD red 4Tb Hard Drive formatted Ext 4 inside my HTPC and uploaded some videos & music to it

    Comparing NAS Stream to the internal HDD

    With the internal Hard Drive:

    Video appears better, eg: 4K has more clarity with better depth & slightly better colour & sharpness

    Sound in video is different, loud action noises, etc are clearer & louder, where as vocals are a bit subdued by this

    Audio is also better, HD music definitely has more punch in bass & high treble is slightly sharper and clearer

    NAS: OMV 3.0.99 wired / intel G3258 / Asus Z97K

    HTPC: LE 8.2.5 / intel i3-7100 / Gigabyte H270M-D3H

    GTX1050 to 4K OLED / STX Essence to Aktimate Mini

  • Upscaling 720p to 2160p

    Picture & Audio Fixed

    The Concord brand HDMI cables have rather large aluminium looking plug heads, I had 2 of these in the TV's HDMI 1&2 inputs which are very close together & they were squashed in fairly tight against each other,

    HDMI 1 : HTPC picture quality was down & audio was not synced ... but HDMI 2 : the Blu-ray player when I tested it out it had a weird overall strong purple/pinkish tint on startup, video playback etc?

    so I plugged the Blu-ray into HDMI 3 & all the problems have gone

    One more Question .. LibreELEC upscales my 720p & 1080p videos I backed up on the NAS, so if I installed a Blu-ray player in my HTPC would I get the same upscaling to 3840×2160 from my original blu-ray disks?

  • Upscaling 720p to 2160p

    The HDMI inputs 1&2 ( these are recommended for 4K ) on new TV are on LHS, so I moved my HTPC to that side temporarily as a 2 metre HDMI cable was longest I had.

    Today I bought a 3 metre 4K cable a $35 Concord brand from Jaycar & set it all up ... Whilst playing video the picture quality is quite noticably down ?

    Video motion was smooth but looked like 720p & when scanning or moving through my Kodi library sideways motion was juddery & not smooth

    LibreELEC settings showed 3840×2160 at 59.94hz - but TV info showed 3840×2160 at 30hz? and I couldn't find anyway in settings to change it

    So I reconnected the 2 metre cable again (stretched it to HDMI 4 after squeezing everything up) .. video smooth and sharp + TV info back to 3840×2160 at 60hz and all is good again

    I thought HDMI was good up to 5 metres ?


    Also to make matters worse I have some speaker issues .. the powered speaker is on the LHS, 1.5 metre RCA cables worked perfectly ..

    but 3 metre cable seem to give a slight lipsync problem which varies from very slight on lower grade video to very noticable on say 1080p etc

    The 1.5 metre cable would fit if I made the LHS powered speaker into a RHS speaker & and the RHS passive speaker as a LHS speaker .. then running sound card RHS RCA output to the powered (now RHS) speaker's input & visa-versa for the passive speaker

    Would this make for any problems ?? all powered speakers seem to be on the left hand side

  • Upscaling 720p to 2160p

    I just bought a Panasonic 4K OLED TV

    when I plugged in my HTPC to the TV, the only thing I changed was resolution from 1920×1080 to 3840×2160 at 59.9hz in LibreELEC settings

    All my 720p & 1080p videos appear to be upscaled to 2160p ?

    this really stood out with the 720p videos

    My video card temperature used to run at 27 - 34℃ it now goes somewhere from 36 - 52℃

    the CPU temp & useage is also up a little bit

    My old TV is a Panasonic Plasma 1080p

    My HTPC

    LibreELEC 8.2.1

    MB: Gigabyte H270M-D3H

    CPU: i3-7100

    Video Card: Asus GTX1050 2Gb Phoenix

  • setting up drives on new intel PC

    I've built a new PC to be my HTPC

    MB: Gigabyte H270M-D3H

    CPU: i3-7100

    reusing my Asus GTX1050 2Gb Phoenix

    Questions are about when installing LibreELEC

    1: As the O/S will be on a SSD would 250Gb be too big ? - I have a spare one

    2: If I install an extra internal drive as storage (it's been formatted EXT4) will it show up and be fully useable

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    No reinstall yet, left things as is .. except all TV Shows are now properly indexed

    I changed Skin to Confluence to re-index .. for some unknown reason this always seems to do a better job of it?

    But: a quick look in Systems / Video

    GPU: GTX 1050/PCIe/SSE2

    OpenGL version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.59

    Obviously didn't look here before

    Besides the H.265 10 bit, very old TV Shows from 1950-80's are clearer .. less noise, artifacts or shimmer etc

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    Now that you asked .. the "intel" in "10-bit HEVC support for recent Intel GPU generations"

    I might be barking up the wrong tree .. that doesn't refer to Nvidia

    I'll reinstall LibreELEC 8.0.1 and see if it's just the newer GTX 1050 video card that's done the vast improvement, I never though to test that out first as it was not supposed to have driver support .. the old video card might have been a bit :thumbdown:

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    Went out and bought the Asus GTX1050 2Gb Phoenix video card at $50 more than a GTX 1030, it's nice and small + runs off the motherboard for power

    Fully wiped/uninstalled LibreELEC 8.0.1 & reinstalled with LibreELEC 8.1.0 beta with v304.135 Nvidia legacy driver to add 10-bit HEVC support

    I now have really, really great video quality with abolutely no sign of banding, pixelation or artifacts what so ever :)

    SWMBO said the overall picture is a fair bit sharper, I think it could be a little bit, but we both agree that the contrast is a quite a lot better as is the overall picture quality

    In video setting there are now a sharpen & a noise adjustment option which I left alone

    At the computer shop everyones pretty excited & hyped up about Coffee Lake

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    With my Minix neo X8-H Plus I flashed it with Lollypop but went back to Kitkat

    After many tests I put the MyGica? variant of Kodi with Estuary skin on it.. works great except for any HEVC .265 they make it run too hot (if they work at all) and gets the very mild judders

    I was looking at either the U9-H or the U1 which takes LibreELEC okay

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    I've been converting some videos with handbrake to H.265 to halve the space they use on my NAS as it's at 90% full .. maybe easier to buy another NAS and leave them at H.264

    So I'll wait till my NAS is 95% and see what comes along support wise for video cards and Gemini & Coffee Lake cpu's

    Thanks for all the advice, it seems that the GT 1030 will only decode & playback HEVC H.265, so I might try one as a cheap option for now .. but an upgrade to the GTX 1060 would also give the ability to encode as well

    There still are current Nvidia Linux Driver updates, whether these have the same support as Windows driver I don't know

  • Video Card for HEVC 265 10bit

    Might look harder at all this ..

    The HEVC H.265 10-bit decoding videocard will smooth out the pixilation, artifacts and banding etc

    The Gtx 960 is the first graphics card that supports HDMI 2.0 and comes equipped with a hardware-based H.265 or HEVC video decoder

    So I just assume that the GTX 960 & upward cards would be ideal as a future proof videocard for a HTPC

    I know there is hardware and software decoding and I don't fully understand these

    But the theory for my set up is

    - The video on a harddrive is in storage

    - it's accessed by software with help from the operating system on the CPU

    - then sent to the graphics card for hardware decoding then on to the TV for viewing

    what am I missing here that I don't understand?

    I am up in years, and try to simplify thing so as to not get too lost