Videos on Linux look blurrier than on Windows

OS: Fedora 35 Wayland

Version: VLC media player 4.0.0-dev Otto Chriek (revision 4.0.0-dev-17191-gc404fdb2)

GPU: AMD RX580 with amdgpu driver

I'm currently switching from Windows to Linux and I noticed that videos on Linux look a bit blurrier than on Windows. I'm running Fedora 35 KDE with Wayland though this also happens when using X11. Hardware acceleration is set to VAAPI via DRM and it happens to give the least blurry image of all available options. I have attached two images for the comparison.

hg_windows.tif

hg_linux.tif

changed the description

You need to compare without hardware decoding acceleration. Otherwise, you're just comparing the video decoding hardware drivers, not VLC...

What do you mean ? Should I try with other hardware decoding acceleration method ?

You should try with none.

changed title from Videos on Linux look blurrier than on Widows to Videos on Linux look blurrier than on Windows

Same thing without hardware acceleration.

no_hwaccel.tif

Then it might be the OpenGL vout on Linux :/

Could you post a sample of your video, please?

Also, do you observe the same issue on VLC3?

Yes this issue also exists on VLC3

Can you check against another "passthrough" vout, like xcb_xv, wl_shm or xcb_x11? Since you use wayland, wl_shm is probably the best for this.

I wasn't able to use wl_shm on the lastest nightly so I switched to x11 to test xcb_x11 and xcb_xv. Both output are as blurry as the opengl output. The only difference I could find was that colors were a bit different from the opengl output.

Color is something we can probably do something about, but unfortunately the difference probably means that there is some kind of post-processing on Windows, or that the display configuration is not the same on linux, which we cannot do something about.

Just for the sake of completeness, can you post full verbose logs?