I've tried MCE on XP and Vista and on two different Acer laptops (one a hig hend, high spec model)and the jpeg picture quality when viewing slideshow is simply APPALLING and unusable.
They are slighly blurred and lacking in detail.

When I view the same photos via the normal Windows Slideshow the the stills are pin sharp, high res quality
The difference is like that of High def and Standatd def...maybe more!

It can't be my gear as the quality difference is there to be seen directly on both the laptop screen displays or on the connected plasma TV (via HDMI, VGA or MCE extender in my 360).

What baffles me most is that this 'bug' doesn't seem to be well documented.  I think i found only one thread on it in the newsgroups by a German journalist.

Can somebody explain to me why my photos look like something off a VCD when viewed via MCE?
The photos were taken with a Nikon D70 DSLR at 2240x1448 resolution.

I urge ayou to check your photos against MCE and Widows Explorer Slideshow.  I think you may be a bit shocked in the difference in quality.

KevMull,  THANK YOU - I've also been really annoyed with this issue.   See my thread link below.  I upgraded from MCE 2005 to Vista because this was "resolved", but obviously it is not.    (Try to "zoom" in on picture, it's pretty weak - no new pixels loaded.)

It's such a shame when you have a fast PC, huge high resolution display, higher resolution pictures, and they end up looking like poop (relatively).   

That said, the My Pictures interface in VMC is beautiful.  So please, please, please let us see our pictures in at least native screen resolution!

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/202973.aspx

Hmm, I honestly haven't heard much of this issue.  Which graphics cards are you guys using?  I'm aware of us not loading new pixels in zoom, but I don't see any reason why we shouldn't look as good as Windows.

I've had the same poor quality on two differnt laptops with two different graphic cards.

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 - 256 MB

and

ATI Radeon Xpress 1300

Hi!

 

I have the exact same issue and Im using an ATI X1250 (690G) from AMD/ATI, with the latest Catalyst drivers.

kind regards

Henrik

 

I'm 7600GS @ 1920x1080 @ 60Hz.    162.22 (last non-stuttering driver for me).

I don't think it's video card related.   You can "prove" the blurry image theory more easily with a test pattern image.  If I take a 1920x1080 image where each horizontal row of pixels is an alternating color, in VMC you won't see each row, you'll get some weird aliasing horizontal bars, not alternating color rows.    The only way you can see the image as intended, is using Windows Picture Gallery and selecting "Actual Size".

Love to have an update to fix this. 

 

In Vista, Media Center uses GDI+ to render photos but Photo Gallery uses WinCodecs.  This may have something to do with it.  We'll investigate more and try to make sure we're on par with Photo Gallery.

Thanks!

KevMull:

I've tried MCE on XP and Vista and on two different Acer laptops (one a hig hend, high spec model)and the jpeg picture quality when viewing slideshow is simply APPALLING and unusable.
They are slighly blurred and lacking in detail.

When I view the same photos via the normal Windows Slideshow the the stills are pin sharp, high res quality
The difference is like that of High def and Standatd def...maybe more!

It can't be my gear as the quality difference is there to be seen directly on both the laptop screen displays or on the connected plasma TV (via HDMI, VGA or MCE extender in my 360).

What baffles me most is that this 'bug' doesn't seem to be well documented.  I think i found only one thread on it in the newsgroups by a German journalist.

Can somebody explain to me why my photos look like something off a VCD when viewed via MCE?
The photos were taken with a Nikon D70 DSLR at 2240x1448 resolution.

I urge ayou to check your photos against MCE and Widows Explorer Slideshow.  I think you may be a bit shocked in the difference in quality.

 

I also am having this issue with photo gallery and Microsoft Office Picture Manager. No problems with this in XP - it just started last week when I installed Vista on a new hard drive. Even if I zoom in just a little bit, it get pixelated/blurry - but if I set that same image as my desktop, it looks just fine (even though it's actually a larger size than the one I zoomed in on).

It also seems to be happening in IE 7 with some larger images (pixelated when they weren't in XP on the same image/website), though it is only noticable when actually viewing a larger picture, and not when viewing a normal website or normal sized picture. This seems to happen less often though.

The complaint that MCE slideshows have poor resolution is a very old one. Over the
last several years there have been many posts on TGB on the issue.  I remember a couple
of years ago that some MS engineer posted an admission that they first converted the
pic to SD and then converted that to the resolution of the screen (which is pretty
obviously going the give poor resolution on anything better than an SD screen).  He
also promised the issue would be fixed in their next MCE release.  Looks like it
wasn't.

--Milt--

I have recently had similar experiences whereby images fed via the Windows Media Center/Extender appear 'soft'. My OS is Vista Home Premium edition.

I have a HD projector which supports 1280x768 resolution and 1080i for HDTV.
It has DVI-I and HDMI inputs (amongst others).

If I display jpeg images (greater than 1280x768) directly from a computer
via the DVI-I input, the picture quality is excellent. If I display the same
images using Windows Media Center and a Linksys DMA-2200 MCE via the HDMI
input (1080i) the picture quality is degraded and looks distinctly 'soft'.
Satellite HDTV (1080i) pictures fed via HDMI are spectacular - they look as
good as the 1280x768 still images.

Anyone know if this is fixed by installing the June 2008 Media Center update for Vista?

Pixelz:

Anyone know if this is fixed by installing the June 2008 Media Center update for Vista?

Not as far as I can tell. I've been annoyed by this as well. The pictures look good if I view them one by one in Windows Live Photo Gallery, but even in Windows Live Photo Gallery, they get blury if I view them as a slide show. They are blury in Media Center as well as over my Linksys extender. I know the pictures are much better quality, because my Pioneer Plasma can display pictures through Windows Media Sharing. If I view the pictures that way they are very crisp on my plasma, but if I view them through the Linksys extender they look terrible. Also, if I view them in Picasa as a slide show they are crisp as well. For this reason I mostly use Picasa to view my pictures. Windows Live Photo Gallery is awesome at importing pictures (love the grouping feature), but it's terrible at viewing pictures and so is media center. The marketing language for media center claims you can view your pictures in HD, but it's SD at best really.

superswiss, you're exactly right.

Does anyone know if/when this might be fixed?  

I didn't realize how much the quality suffered when viewing pictures using my extender until I connected my laptop to my Samsung using a VGA cable.

Through the extender, the images seemed soft and not very detailed.

With the VGA cable, the pictures look excellent... like a show on HD.

Any updates or tests to perform (to help diagnose the problem) from the Microsoft guys around here?

thanks.

Great, I can see "giga-pixel images on my iPhone", but they still look like pooh on my 1920x1080 VMC rig.

http://livelabs.com/blog/seadragon-goes-mobile/