CRT Shaders tailored specifically for watching Movies and Videos?

RetroArch Additions Shaders
#1

I did a quick search on here and I wasn’t seeing much of anything about this topic.

I’ve recently been using the FFMPEG core as my primary video player on my PC instead of VLC, because I wanted to play around and see what kinds of looks I could get going. I was in for a harsh lesson on how drastic a resolution change can affect some of these shaders to say the least…

I’ve been itching to watch some old classics I barely remember like Terminator, Predator, Aliens, Robocop, etc - and I’d very much love to check them out through the lens of a nice CRT shader. I feel this would be less of a problem if I could find digital 640x480 copies of these movies, but as it stands I’m only aware of how to get 720p and 1080p versions of movies these days.

Anyone have a nice preset I can throw together, or know some tricks for working with shaders at these higher resolutions? (Or where to get SD version movies these days? lol)

#2

Hyllian-3D might be a good fit here.

But honestly I’m not sure, still love this idea.

#3

I remember @aorin1 making a topic or similar about his setup for retro movies and series.

#4

You can force a lower resolution in the preset (there are some threads about this with regards to upscaled cores; be sure to set the filter to bilinear so that it downscales with that instead of nearest neighbor) and then most shaders should work okay. Most are designed to work at 240p, so you’ll be losing a lot of res, and the scanlines won’t look quite right because standard NTSC video is 480i not 240p, but whatever. If you want to drop to 480p instead, crt-geom and crt-royale will handle the interlacing for you.

#5

There are some VHS mimicking shaders stuff available from what I recall, I’ve never used them. I personally use mostly standard CRT shaders for stuff I personally downconverted to something between 400-540p (no borders) or which orginally comes from a DVD source in the first place. Movies that come from the Cinema like the ones mentioned will typicially not have 480 lines on a DVD, because of the widescreen format with borders (mostly 1:1.85 or 1:2.35). With the latter you have like, 384 lines or something once cropped? (From an NTSC-Source, PAL is bit more). There’s of course also “Pan & Scan”, I don’t know what options you have with RA for cropping/zooming on the fly.
On the weak machine that’s actually connected to my TV I’m stuck with low-requirement shaders, but I find that Zfast or CRT-Pi already give nice results for my taste. It’s certainly much better than standard mediaplayer scaling. Usually, I adjust the scanline parameters and sometimes the mask settings accordingly. Scanlines you’d obviously barely want to be visible.

One thing I noticed when trying some stuff out on my desktop monitor is that some more advanced shaders (e.g. easymode-halation) seem to cause/amplify color banding issues, I got very noticable artifacting in dark areas. So that may be another reason not to try anything fancy and stick to simple shaders.

#6

I think it’s worth mentioning that the “resolution” of film is basically infinite, so watching those 80s and 90s movies in hi def actually results in greater image fidelity.