Video Playback Quality Options

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We’ve not explicitly documented this anywhere because it has a tendency to change over time but it is implicitly documented in some places. However, these translate entirely to MPV directives which are logged on the start of each playback. So you can look at them there at any time. The Ultra and Make My GPU Hurt are implicitly documented here: HTPC Tips and Tricks - #5 by gbooker02

Currently (but obviously subjected to change):

  • The ANGLE renderer qualities (Windows only) are identical to the non-ANGLE ones except for setting gpu-context = angle. For some reason on lower end GPUs the non-Jinc scalers appear to perform better in ANGLE than in D3D11. This really shouldn’t be the case but I’ve seen it make a difference between stuttering playback and not on some iGPUs.
  • Low uses bilinear scaling for all three (luma, chroma, and downscale) and turns off debanding, antiringing, and hdr-compute-peak
  • Normal is same as low but uses spline36 as the scaler for all three
  • High turns on correct-downscaling, linear-downscaling, sigmoid-upscaling, debanding, and hdr-compute-peak.
  • Maximum changes scalers to ewa_lanczossharp
  • Ultra uses the shader SSimSuperRes-mitchell and changes scalers to match the recommended for this shader. It also increases the iteration count for debanding (which a slightly higher threshold) and turns on antiringing.
  • Make my GPU Hurt changes the scalers to FSRCNNX_x2_8-0-4-1, SSimDownscaler, and KrigBilateral with changes to scalers to match recommended as well as increasing debanding a bit more.
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