Ghosting and clouding when watching MKVs

[redec]

I have a very frustrating problem - when watching movie mkvs from a bluray source I get a very distracting "clouding" affect in the video. In some high-motion scenes it is a lot of blur, in slow scenes it is as if certain regions of the screen don't get redrawn. For example when viewing someone's face on screen, you will see the edges of their head move slightly, but their eyes+nose do not move. It is really weird and distracting. Mkvs of TV shows do not have this problem, dvd isos do not have this problem, only movie mkvs from bluray have the problem. I have tried 3 different codecs and they all do it (built-in, divx, and ffdshow) so I don't really think it's a codec problem. Furthermore if I take one of these troublesome mkvs, put it on a usb drive, plug it directly into the tv and play it from there then it looks perfect.

I am running WMC7, ATI Radeon HD 5450, on a samsung ES8000 tv connected via HDMI.

That's all I know for sure...after doing some googling here's what I *think* is happening - I think it's something to do with the framerate. My media center is outputting at 60Hz...tv mkvs and dvds display fine because they're 30fps and it (I'm guessing the video card?) will just do a nice 2:2 pulldown to display it at 60Hz. But bluray mkvs are 24fps so there's no simple conversion to 60Hz, so I'm guessing it's interpolating the extra 36fps (and doing a terrible job of it) rather than doing a 3:2 pulldown. I've looked for options to configure this behavior in the video card (catalyst control center) but any changes in there don't really seem to make any difference - it seems to me that mediacenter maintains its own settings and ignores anything configured in there...I didn't really find anything that looked overly relevant in there anyways...

Is it mediacenter or the video card that does that 24fps->60Hz conversion? Would this problem go away if I purchased a newer video card? My TV runs at 240Hz, so ideally (I'm not sure if it's possible) I could run my mediacenter at 240Hz or 120Hz and then there would be perfect scaling for both 24 and 30fps source content. I'm really not sure if there are video cards that output at that high frequency tho? And I can't really find if my TV supports a 120Hz source signal. Am I barking up the wrong tree? If it is really this, it seems like other people should probably be having this problem too...

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

[leroys1000]

Run catalyst control center and check the different settings under
"My digital flat panels".
It has different controls and a setting to add different HD resolutions.
Also make sure that there is no zoom applied to the video.
Zooming can cause the problems you are having.
Right click the video and scroll over to zoom to check.

[redec]

Thanks for the suggestions, but no it is not zoomed. And as for the different resolutions changing it in the CCC only seems to affect the desktop, once I start media center it applies its own resolution/config...trying to change the resolution inside media center it doesn't even give me the option of 24p....I'm not sure I'd even want to run at 24p anyways tho cuz it would probably make my TV and DVDs 'choppy', no?

[kp4akb]

I am having the same problem as "redec" when playing WTV recordings on a Sharp TV using catalyst software. Some times the eyes do not move at the same time as the rest of the face and the video looks like clouds particularly in dark scenes. Will start trying to figure it out because the "wife" does not like the quality compared to the "cable box".

One other thing is the audio lags the picture if you fast forward through commercials.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[Marc_G]

I know this is an old thread, but I just noticed it. I've seen similar problems when I got a new TV, and the solution was to turn off "Motion Smoothing" on the TV. I think processing things the HTPC video card/software were doing were interacting in a negative way with processing the TV was trying to apply.
Turned off motion smoothing and all was well.