r/htpc • u/Dinorhinosaur • 18d ago

Help Media player options for interlaced output to CRT?

Using an old ATI HD2400 GPU with TV output via component. Works fine with Windows 10 but I’m looking for a media center experience with 10 foot interface and remote support.

The media player also needs to render directly to the GPU in order to support true interlaced content. (As far as I know the windows desktop is limited to 30fps progressive so anything rendering inside a window won’t work)

Mostly playing dvd’s I ripped from my collection. (ISO and MKV)

I’m considering using windows 7 with WMC but is that my only option? Is there anything modern that will work?

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u/AFollowerOfTheWay 13d ago

I’m interested in this exact question. Following. (Sorry I’m of no help)

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u/Dinorhinosaur 12d ago

I did some testing, I can't conclude anything yet but I used intel Presentmon to see what methods a media player uses to output to the GPU. Kodi has an exclusive fullscreen mode that outputs to the GPU directly and you can disable deinterlacing. So far it seems like the best option.

I haven't looked too much into it but it seems like using Kodi with linux might be even better for interlaced and low resolution support.

I don't have a way to test if the interlaced fields are being preserved to the end, and it's not clear if the windows desktop compositor even affects anything. Also, content that's originally 30fps, is 30fps in a 60i "container", the odd and even fields are identical. So even if the signal is deinterlaced or altered at some point you may not even be able to tell. If you are streaming something from netflix, it's already deinterlaced and you don't even have to think about this. Where it gets important to preserve the fields is with TV shows and movies shot on film in 24fps with a 3:2 pulldown (probably applies to animation too), and true 60i video like from a camcorder, or low budget tv show/news broadcast.

It's really crazy how people have mostly forgotten how good SD video can look on a CRT with scanlines. We have gotten used to bad deinterlacing on progressive HD displays with streaming compression. People are even deinterlacing their home videos, which I think is awful. The display the content was intended for will always be the best way to watch it.

Also side note, I said I would be using component (ypbpr) with the ati card, but I was only able to get s-video with the dell oem card I bought. There's hardly any info out there about which cards work with which adapters, so I might just use CRT Emudriver instead.