Bluray movies through players and through PC.

[Easy Rhino]

It's most definitely not a myth. This misconception is how ridiculously overpriced HDMI cables are marketed to their potential marks. I'm not trying to be awkward here, Easy. I just hate to see people fall victim to myths like this and waste their money. Read on!

As long as a digital signal can be recovered without errors - and this includes the resultant signal after going through error correction circuitry and repaired to its original form - then the transmission literally is perfect, resulting in perfect picture and sound. This is a basic property of any digital transmission and occurs inside PCs just the same as over the air or through a cable TV transmissions. The point at which the signal cannot be recovered fully is called the "digital cliff edge". The effect is generally very abrupt and annoying, especially on a TV transmission, where you get picture and sounds breakup.

I did actually see this proved on I think, Watchdog it was, a UK consumer program, where they examined the signal with an oscilloscope and there was no difference between the cheap cable and the expensive one. The displayed picture on the TV of course also showed no difference.

Therefore, the picture and sound through a $2 HDMI cable will be identical to a $200 cable.

I checked out some of the links in your google search and none of them proved your point, unfortunately. People were seeing artifacts, because the signal had been degraded beyond the point where the error recovery circuitry could fully reconstruct the transmitted signal, generally over long cable lengths. In such cases, you will most definitely see the kind of artifacting they are describing.

im not saying digital cables arent overpriced, i am saying that digital degradation is real and is transmittable based on the same premise that over length signals degrade. a mis-manufactured hdmi cable will see greater degradation over less length. that is my point.

 

[qubit]

im not saying digital cables arent overpriced, i am saying that digital degradation is real and is transmittable based on the same premise that over length signals degrade. a mis-manufactured hdmi cable will see greater degradation over less length. that is my point.

Ah, ok yes, absolutely. That's not what I understood from your previous post.

Indeed, devices have to be of good quality to work well, whether in the analog or digital realm.

 

[Mussels]

im not saying digital cables arent overpriced, i am saying that digital degradation is real and is transmittable based on the same premise that over length signals degrade. a mis-manufactured hdmi cable will see greater degradation over less length. that is my point.

yes, they do degrade over distance. but you dont get a fuzzy picture, or a blocky one - you get a good signal, or nothing.


I'm running lots of cheap cables with joiners between rooms in my house, and at 1360x768 they work awesome... but at 1680x1050 and above, i get massive red lines and artifacts all over the image at that length.

If his cable was the problem, poor blacks would NOT be the issue. he'd be getting massive issues.


Modern video card drivers have fancy stuff to help boost image quality:

the PS3 is outdated. its far, far more likely that the PS3 just has less video optimisations for blu ray, and his PC is doing some fancy pants tricks.

 

[Wile E]

modern video cards (and the drivers) definitely have things designed to make movies look better.

But less accurate. I kill all of those "enhancements" in my players/drivers. I hate that crap. It actually looks worse to me on HD content.

Kill all the enhancements on the PC, and the PS3 and PC will have identical output.

 

[Mussels]

But less accurate. I kill all of those "enhancements" in my players/drivers. I hate that crap. It actually looks worse to me on HD content.

Kill all the enhancements on the PC, and the PS3 and PC will have identical output.

well no, i think thats the problem. I think the PS3 has some ehnancements that are being forced on, and its degrading the image in some scenes.

My media PC has no enhancements, but it still looks better than the PS3 on the same TV. the PS3 image looks oversharpened, as i stated earlier.

 

[Easy Rhino]

yes, they do degrade over distance. but you dont get a fuzzy picture, or a blocky one - you get a good signal, or nothing.


I'm running lots of cheap cables with joiners between rooms in my house, and at 1360x768 they work awesome... but at 1680x1050 and above, i get massive red lines and artifacts all over the image at that length.

If his cable was the problem, poor blacks would NOT be the issue. he'd be getting massive issues.


Modern video card drivers have fancy stuff to help boost image quality:
http://img.techpowerup.org/101206/Capture132.jpg

the PS3 is outdated. its far, far more likely that the PS3 just has less video optimisations for blu ray, and his PC is doing some fancy pants tricks.

im telling you hdmi as a digital signal does indeed degrade with crappy cables.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm

 

[qubit]

well no, i think thats the problem. I think the PS3 has some ehnancements that are being forced on, and its degrading the image in some scenes.

My media PC has no enhancements, but it still looks better than the PS3 on the same TV. the PS3 image looks oversharpened, as i stated earlier.

I had a feeling that artificial "enhancements" were causing the differences. I did ask the OP if all these were turned off, but didn't get an answer.

 

[Wile E]

well no, i think thats the problem. I think the PS3 has some ehnancements that are being forced on, and its degrading the image in some scenes.

My media PC has no enhancements, but it still looks better than the PS3 on the same TV. the PS3 image looks oversharpened, as i stated earlier.

Check your settings on the PS3. There are filters that you have to disable, iirc.

 

[Easy Rhino]

also remember that difference sources output video slightly differently. i know that when i switch outputs to my tv i have to change the video settings on it slightly to adjust. usually soften the image and boost color.

 

[newtekie1]

im telling you hdmi as a digital signal does indeed degrade with crappy cables.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm

No one is saying it doesn't degrade, but due to the nature of digital signals, the degradation doesn't matter and won't appear in the picture unless it is so bad that it causes massive problems which would be insanely obvious.

 

[Mussels]

im telling you hdmi as a digital signal does indeed degrade with crappy cables.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/hdmi-cables.htm

you're missing the point: signal degradation doesnt mean its going to degrade the image. as your article says, they have error correction to help get around the degradation of the signal.



You're saying: the cables lose signal over distance!

me (and a few others that i've seen) agree - we just say its not going to do anything so minor as adjust a few pixels or make it a tad worse image quality. when it fucks up, it fucks up BIG.

 

[Easy Rhino]

hrm...

First, it's true that if a digital video signal stays intact from one point to another, there's no degradation of the image. The digital signal itself can degrade, in purely electrical terms, quite a bit over a distance run, but if at the end of that run the bitstream can be fully and correctly reconstituted, it doesn't matter what degradation the signal suffered--once that information is reconstituted at the receiving end, it's as good as new.

That's a big "if," however. Ideally speaking, digital signals start out as something close to a "square wave," which is an instantaneous transition from one voltage to another; these transitions signal the beginnings and ends of bits. (In practice, such transitions aren't strictly possible, and trying to achieve them can generate harmful noise; consequently, high-order harmonics are usually filtered out which results in the wave starting out squarish but not-quite-square.) A square wave, unfortunately, is impossible to convey down any transmission line because it has infinite bandwidth; to convey it accurately, a cable would have to convey all frequencies, out to infinity, all at the same level of loss ("attenuation"). What happens, therefore, in any run of cable is that a digital signal starts out looking relatively nice and somewhat square, and comes out the other end both weaker and rounded-off. The transitions that mark the edges of bits get smoothed and leveled to the point that, far from that ideal square wave, they look like relatively gentle slopes. Portions of the signal lost to impedance mismatch bounce around in the cable and mix with these rounded-off slopes, introducing an unpredictable and irregular component to the signal; crosstalk from the other pairs in the HDMI bundle also contribute uneven and essentially random noise. As a result, what arrives at your display doesn't look very much like what was sent.

 

[Mussels]

First, it's true that if a digital video signal stays intact from one point to another, there's no degradation of the image. The digital signal itself can degrade, in purely electrical terms, quite a bit over a distance run, but if at the end of that run the bitstream can be fully and correctly reconstituted, it doesn't matter what degradation the signal suffered--once that information is reconstituted at the receiving end, it's as good as new.

^ that part exactly. If the image makes it across, its 'as good as new'

Whenever i'd have bad HDMI, its resulted in lots of artifacting, the image blinking on and off, or a static image moving and crawling across the screen. serious visual issues, not minor ones that could be ignored or not noticed.

 

[Easy Rhino]

well then it beats me. as if seen for myself a crappy hdmi cable look blotchy compared to a higher quality hdmi cable.

 

[newtekie1]

As a result, what arrives at your display doesn't look very much like what was sent.

Yes, the signal doesn't, but it doesn't have to. As long as the device on the other end can tell the 1 from the 0 it doesn't matter what the wave looks like. That is the beauty of digial signals.

 

[Wile E]

well then it beats me. as if seen for myself a crappy hdmi cable look blotchy compared to a higher quality hdmi cable.

And my crappy cheap cable looks exactly the same as the expensive one I have. Point?

 

[qubit]

well then it beats me. as if seen for myself a crappy hdmi cable look blotchy compared to a higher quality hdmi cable.

Then you were looking at video corruption. Obvious breakup and blocking artifacts are some of the symptons of a corrupted signal. As I and others have been saying, as long as you can recover the signal with error correction, the degradation doesn't matter at all.

In your case, substituting a better quality cable and/or using a shorter cable should remove this video corruption and give you a perfect picture.

That article you quoted (from god knows where) explained all this really well.

 

[Easy Rhino]

well then the OP really does not have any issue. it seemed to me that he was describing artifacting and pixelation in his steam message to me. but here he says just the color is slightly different and the dark scenes look a bit different. obviously it is not a cable problem or a ps3 problem but simply the output settings are different on each device.

 

[qubit]

well then the OP really does not have any issue. it seemed to me that he was describing artifacting and pixelation in his steam message to me. but here he says just the color is slightly different and the dark scenes look a bit different. obviously it is not a cable problem or a ps3 problem but simply the output settings are different on each device.

Exactly.

 

[Easy Rhino]

Exactly.

lol i just wasted so much time

 

[kid41212003]

I had a feeling that artificial "enhancements" were causing the differences. I did ask the OP if all these were turned off, but didn't get an answer.

According to NVIDIA Control panel, the video image settings are left to the Player which is MPC + CCCP, all settings are at default...

I have no idea how to turn off the filters on the PS3.

well then the OP really does not have any issue. it seemed to me that he was describing artifacting and pixelation in his steam message to me. but here he says just the color is slightly different and the dark scenes look a bit different. obviously it is not a cable problem or a ps3 problem but simply the output settings are different on each device.

Video artifacts only visible on very dark scenes like i stated.

If i have to put them on a scale, through PC it looks 100%, and through PS3 it's 93%.

Maybe in my own eyes i prefer the enhanced images, but it may not look good in other people eyes.

Thanks everyone for the inputs, i probably get a cheap cable somewhere just to test it out through.

 

[CJCerny]

I suspect the reason that your PS3 blu-ray output looks more "blocky" than your PC is probably a lot more simple than this thread has made it. The brightness on your monitor is set too high. Those big blocks you are seeing in really dark areas on the PS3 output are sub-black info that you should normally not be able to see. It only becomes visible when the brightness on a display is turned up much higher than it should be. The reason those same blocks are not present from your PC output is that the video driver has control over the brightness.

If you pause the PS3 when it is playing a relatively dark scene, the dark areas of the display should be just as dark as the display is when it is powered off. If your black areas are only a shade of grey, then your brightness is too high. Turn your brightness down as much as possible and turn off any "game" or "vivid" settings on your LCD or set it to "theater" mode and see if those big blocks begin to disappear. Some cheap LCDs won't even let you turn down the brightness far enough to make those big blocks disappear, unfortunately. If you do find a brightness setting that works, then you will have to adjust your PC brightness back up with the driver options.

The problem is not a bad or cheap cable.

 

[qubit]

@CJCerny: the effect you talk about is called "banding" and is certainly a possibility for causing this.

 

[Bo$$]

the ps3 only uses the 7900gt to display the image, the cell processor does all of the heavy lifting. it works completely different that a pc.



wrong. the ps3 outputs whatever the monitor can display at.

*what the max for the game and the monitor is

 

[Steevo]

when you say, "would never transmit data correctly" could you describe what the picture looked like?

The image would never appear, the sound would stutter, and jump, if I held the connector just right I could get a image with large blocks missing, or it would jump like it was only receiving a full frame out of every few, wrong colors or all just one color so it was getting the pixel luma, but not chromatic info, but no sound, if I held it the "just right" other way I could get sound but no image. Tried with another cable and it works fine.



It was caused by cheap bad cables and crappy connectors. I did buy a $12 25' HDMI to run from my PC to my bigscreen, and it works perfect. So while a $15 cable for a camcorder failed, a even cheaper longer cable worked.


Buy cheap cables, but from reputable manufacturers, or with good reviews. If you have a way to check the connection speed great, if not just run a check with a web test or other calibration disk.