Original Xbox – Horrendous 480i

[Jademalo]

Has anyone got any experience with capturing an Original Xbox in 480i?
Trying to get a good capture, but there seems to be something really weird going on.

I’m trying to get this setup going for a friend who speedruns a game that requires 480i on original Xbox. 480p requires modification so it’s not an option.
The intention was to use the OSSC to digitise the 480i signal cleanly with passthrough, then capture it with the Vision E1s. From there, we could apply whatever deinterlacing we wished, since latency was not an issue. I’ve done something similar to this for my Gamecube/Wii in the past, and achieved extremely good results.

480p – https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340633160893333505/579822904313905162/unknown.png
480i – https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340633160893333505/579822873372262410/unknown.png

The 480p capture is definitely accurate, which is 858/720. The 480i capture however has a whole host of issues.
For starters, for some reason it seems to be in limited range. I have absolutely zero idea how this could possibly be the case, but black is quite consistently 16,16,16. For the image captured above I had the vision window set to 601 Limited, which solved that issue. It still seems strange however.
Regardless of that, the whole image is just dreadful. Ideally, each horizontal line of a 480i signal should be full resolution, in this case 720 pixels. This means that with processing, we should only be interpolating 50% of the image temporally. With a simple discard though, we should be getting half vertical resolution but full horizontal resolution.
The image however is just bad. Lines are soft, there is ringing everywhere, there’s all sorts of ghosting all over the image (especially near the yellow text).

I’ve tried manually tweaking until the cows come home, but these seem to be fundamental issues from… somewhere. The above two images were both captured with exactly the same setup – Xbox -> Official Component Cables -> OSSC -> Vision E1S. The only thing that has changed between the two images is the resolution.

Is this an issue with the Xbox? Is the 480i output just absolutely godawful?
Part of me thinks it has to be something weird going on with the OSSC, because in everything else I’ve ever tested, I’ve never seen this large a discrepancy between 480i and 480p. In addition, it doesn’t seem to have the weird limited range issue when I use the VP50Pro.

Any ideas?

[marqs]

I recall noticing some black level inconsistencies (480p vs 480i/576i) on Xbox even in CRT days. Also, the video quality of some Xboxes I’ve seen has been quite bad/noisy, though I’m not sure if those were due to aging caps, video DAC or cable quality.

[Jademalo]

Hmm, that doesn’t bode well then, thanks.
I did a bit more testing as well as getting some data from a friend, and it seems like the Xbox’s 480i output is absolute hot garbage.

We both had different variants of official cables, and both of us had terrible images. Not to mention those cables resulted in great 480p output.

Welp, nothing I can do if it is indeed the Xbox. 😐

[shawly]

A little late to the party, but the reason for this is that the Xbox uses a flicker filter for 480i.

Since you already got a hard/softmodded Xbox, take a look at this thread https://web.archive.org/web/20180817202356/http://www.theisozone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=72006

Disabling the flicker filter either via XBMC (only works for games installed on the HDD, not for disc based games) or by patching the XBE files manually to remove the flicker filter should improve your picture. I don’t know if it improves the image enough to solve all your problems though.

I’ve done something similar to this for my Gamecube/Wii in the past, and achieved extremely good results.

A little off-topic but would you mind sharing your results? I’m interested in what this looks like with the GC/Wii. 🙂

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