FWIW – Decoder Comparison

I’ve decided to share my opinions from a little testing I did this afternoon between 2 decoders in SageTV.  After noticing the difference in decoders the other night while watching the 480i recording I had from a digital station I decided to view things more closely and with other stuff.  To go back a little, I normally use the Cyberlink PDVD7 decoder for Video and for DVD in Sage and use AC3 Filter as the audio decoder.  But after noticing how bad the Cyberlink decoder was with 480i from a digital station (it doesn’t happen with S-Video recordings from satellite), I wanted to see what may be better.  Since my trial of Arcsoft is still available I decided to compare the 2.  It was only a quick comparison, but long enough to find a few things.

In case you haven’t read my other posts, with this 480i recording Cyberlink has a problem that causes the picture to seem to go in and out of focus.  Because of this the picture seems to “jump”; it’s not quite a stutter.  This happens in Overlay or VMR9.  I tried researching this problem Tuesday night, and I think I found a review of some decoders and this was mentioned.  They called it “blending”, so I don’t know if this is the same problem or not.  Changing to the Arcsoft decoder, the problem stopped.  Then I thought maybe the Arcsoft may be my decoder of choice.

Now for some HD.  I tuned to my local news in HD and decided to record it so I could keep switching and comparing the same thing.  First, I used the Arcsoft and VMR9.  Watching the anchor woman, I noticed something right off.  Looking at the mic that she had attached to her shirt, it seemed to move back and forth or jump up and down.  The overall picture looked OK, and if you weren’t trying to look for things you might not notice…but I was trying and I did notice.  Problems using VMR9 is not new to me.  I’ve never been able to use VMR9 with HD material.  I changed to Overlay with the Arcsoft and started the recording back over.  I noticed the same thing using Overlay mode that I did with VMR9.  Now I switched to the Cyberlink decoder and Overlay mode; I know VMR9 and Cyberlink is jumpy (and I’ve tried full screen exclusive) so there’s no point in trying that.  Again, I restarted the recording.  Now everything was smooth and as it should be.  The was no “movement” or jumping of the mic that was attached to her shirt.  This was enough for me to conclude my little test.  It seems that the Arcsoft decoder is better for non-HD material and the Cyberlink is better for HD.  I was hoping that I would find the Arcsoft worked better for all so I could just switch to it full time, but that’s not the case.  I do think that when comparing the 2 players for blu-ray that Arcsoft looks a little better.