Hi Radosław,
I have exactly the same issue here.

I have a very bad image quality (as in your samples) + jerky playback when enabling avivo hardware acceleration.

I'm using PowerDVD 9 Ultra + Radeon 5850 (asus eah5850) + Catalyst 9.12 + Windows 7 x64

Am I missing something or is it "normal" and I should wait for Catalyst and/or Powerdvd updates ???

Thank you.

Hi All,

this is my very first post, so greetings to all folks in this forum

That said, I can confirm I also have this issue. I tried to mess a bit with the deinterlacing parameters of PowerDVD, without really obtaining a satisfactory result. My HTPC has the AMD 780G chipset, so I first tried using the integrated GPU, but then I tried switching to a Radeon HD 4670 because I read somewhere that the hardware deinterlacing is actually performed via shaders in the GPU, and some Radeon HD flavours don't have enough shader power to support the most effective deinterlacing modes (motion-adaptive and vector-adaptive, which gives the best results).

A strange thing is that, if I recall the advanced video options in PowerDVD and open the drop-down list to select the deinterlacing mode, I only see three "intellegible" modes: Default, Weave (don't deinterlace) and Bob (hardware deinterlacing). The drop-down list also contains other options, but these are in form of GUID codes, so I really don't know if these modes work and what they represent. I tried to select some of these voices, but the final effect seems to be the same as selecting BOB (which, by the way, is the most basic deinterlacing mode and gives mediocre results in many scenarios). I also tried to temporarily install PowerDVD on another PC, which uses an old Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, but the problem of "GUID-like" deinterlacing modes is still present, so it seems not to depend on the installed video hardware and/or video drivers.

EDIT: surfing a bit in this forum helped me realize that those "GUID-named" deinterlacing methods can be understood using DirectX hardware caps report utilities. I'll look at them as soon as I go back home this evening.

So far, the best result I could obtain is to set to DEFAULT the hardware deinterlacing mode on PowerDVD, and then switch to the Catalyst drivers and set the AVIVO parameters as follows:

- Use automatic deinterlacing: DISABLED
- Deinterlacing mode: VECTOR ADAPTIVE
- Use pulldown detection: ENABLED
- Enforce smooth video playback: DISABLED

The last option I mentioned, if enabled, actually prevents the most advanced deinterlacing modes to be applied, even if they still can be selected in the Catalyst panel, in order to avoid choppy playback (due to lack of processing power in the GPU to support the requested deinterlacing mode, especially when playing HD video content, such as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD). Keep in mind that ATI GPUs found in integrated chipsets, such as 780G or similar, are believed not to have enough horsepower to compute the most complex deinterlacing methods, at least when playing HD videos.

With respect to choppy playback, for those of you that experience this issue playing PAL video content, to my knowledge PAL DVDs don't use pulldown to convert the framerate as NTSC DVDs do: in the PAL case the video content is just "accelerated" to match 25 fps starting from the original 24 fps. Therefore, the best way to watch PAL video is to set the refresh rate of your monitor/TV to 50 Hz and NOT 60 Hz, in order to match the framerate of the actual video content. I set up things this way in my HTPC / TV and the result is OK. The actual possibility to do so depends on whether your monitor supports 50 Hz refresh rate or not.
My Home Cinema system:

HTPC: AMD Phenom X4 2350e, ATI Radeon HD 4670, mobo Asus w/ AMD 780g chipset

AV Receiver: Onkyo TX-SR507