HOW TO: fix video smearing, blurring and ghosting on ATI video cards
James Bannan17 January 2008121 days ago.
If you're running an ATI video card in your machine, you might have noticed image ghosting, blurring and smearing when playing back DVDs and videos. Here's how to fix it.
If you're running an ATI video card in your machine, you might have noticed image ghosting, blurring and smearing when playing back DVDs and videos. Here's how to fix it.
All my Vista Media Centre machines are based around ATI hardware – I don’t have a particular bias against NVIDIA products, but I’ve found the ATI drivers to be just that much more stable and responsive over time, and sometimes that’s about as complex as my decision-making gets!
I’ve never had any problems of note, but I did notice something quite interesting recently on my main VMC system, which is running a Radeon X1600 Pro HDMI. It was originally plugged into my TV via the VGA input, so it was displaying a 1366x768 screen, and everything looked fine. I wanted to run everything through the HDMI port, so I plugged it in via the HDMI output on the graphics card instead, and ran it at 1080i (1920x1080), and I instantly noticed a horrible amount of image ghosting and blurring on DVD playback which I’d never been aware of before.
I have another VMC running on a smaller LCD screen (1440x800) and when I looked very closely on that screen, the ghosting was there too – it had just never come to my attention.
After doing some digging around online, it seems that this is a documented problem with the ATI’s AVIVO platform, which is designed to enhance video playback on ATI GPUs. The problem is the AVIVO driver’s default behaviour with regards to Noise Reduction Control and Edge Enhancement Control. In both cases the driver is applying so much correction that the image is smudged and general picture quality dramatically worsened, and there’s no way of adjusting those settings viat the Catalyst Control Center.
Luckily, the fix is quite remarkably easy. Simply go into the registry and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video. There will probably be a number of folders beneath this key, all of which have a subkey called “0000”. However, there should only be one subkey “0000” which is expandable – this is the one you want. Browse to 0000\UMD\DXVA, and create the following two strings:
“TRDenoise” = 0"
"DXVA_DetailEnhance" = 0
Restart VMC and check out DVD playback – all suggestion of ghosting and smearing should have vanished. If there’s any residual problems with image quality, apparently the range of accepted values for the strings created above is from -100 to 100. I applied the fix to both my VMC systems and the default value of 0 worked just fine.