Video Hardware Aceleration

[rickzor]

Today i have runned for the first time a 1080p video in my pc, and frankly i was disappointed with my pcs performance with it.
My pc:

Athlon 3500+ @ 2.5 ghz
Geforce XFX 7900GT with 256 mb
1Gb DDR1 pc 3200 (400mhz)
Maxtor 160 GB SATAII HDD

I have had some rare slowdowns in some parts, but enough to take away the joy of the video. I've runned it in windows media player and vlc, the same thing happened in both, and cpu usage oftenly rised up to 80%/100% leading me to conclude that no Video Hardware Aceleration was being used whatsoever.. A friend of mine with a geforce 8800gts and a athlon 4200+ complained about the same thing.
Do i need to set something in the drivers or in the player in order to enable hardware aceleration and play de video properly?
Also, i have a old pc in my livingroom with windows media center, its a old pentium 4 at 2.4 ghz and a geforce 4 mx 440 128 mb. Whats the most inexpensive video card i could replace with the old gf4 mx in order to view high resolution videos?
(Needless to say the 1080p video runned at 1 frame per minute in this machine )
A 7300 128 agp would do the job?

That's all, i could use some experienced guidance in this please!
Thank you all in advance

 

[nukemaster]

In media player make sure you have DX VA on....

Tools -> options -> Performance -> Advanced -> make sure Turn on DirectX Video Acceleration is on(it should be by default, but check)....

 

[vegeta]

mate, thats funny as cause last nite i had the SAME problem and don't no y. PC is e6400, 4gb ram, x1950pro 256mb gfx. its worked flawlessly b4, and all of a sudden it was sitting around the 90% mark and was get quite choppy in parts. very annoying. WMP seemed to work about 20% better than VLC though. i have NOOO idea what has changed for me from last time i played a 1080p to now. :-S Windows updates?

 

[nukemaster]

is it a WMV file?

 

[vegeta]

mine was a MKV file, x264 video + ac3 sound.
can't speak for rickzor though.

 

[rickzor]

In media player make sure you have DX VA on....

Tools -> options -> Performance -> Advanced -> make sure Turn on DirectX Video Acceleration is on(it should be by default, but check)....

Interesting as i dont seem to have that option on my windows media player 10.

This is what i get :



As for the extention of my video, its hdmov.

 

[nukemaster]

well that feature must be only in VM player 11.

try Gspot to see if it can tell you what kind of file it is internally
http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

 

[vegeta]

is there any video acceleration option in vista? is there one outside of WMP that is like a global setting?

 

[nukemaster]

I am not sure since i still use XP....most new video players will use DXVA by them selves.....

 

[rickzor]

There you go:


So you're saying without wmp11 i cant use my 7900gt for HD movies?

 

[nukemaster]

no....you should still be able to...i have.....i was just asking that since you said you thought it was video acceleration....all the rest of it is on....

Being as it is a Quicktime file, did you try to play it in there?
You may also want to try Media Player Classic....
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358&release_id=403110

sorry i do not have any H.264 to test with....

 

[rickzor]

Even wmp classic didnt cut it, but you where right, this is a quicktime file, and i dont have quicktime installed so i tried out these videos :

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

And they worked perfectly, but not on my media center in my living room with a gf4 mx 440 128 mb and a p4 2.4 ghz, so the question remains, which card should i get for this pc, a really unexpensive card that would make 1080p videos run fine?
Or the cpu wouldnt keep up with the card when it comes to HD movies? (720p works fine in it, even on the gf4mx440)

 

[thuan]

IIRC, your card should support DXVA to a certain degree, not full H264 and VC1 decoding in HW like ATI HD series card (except the HD2900) or full H264 and partial VC1 like nvidia 8xxx series. To check which mode of DXVA your card support use this http://bluesky23.hp.infoseek.co.jp/index.html#DXVAChecker. The site is in Japanese but you should figure it out that you need .NET 3.0 (XP) or VC2005 SP1 runtime (Vista). There's a free DXVA H264 decoder being developed here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123537&page=44 (get it in the first post of the page there or the mirror down below) as an internal filter of MPC-HC (a clone of Windows Media Player 6.4 but with a load more features). You need to use VMR9 (either mode) or Overlay Mixer in XP in order to enable DXVA, for Vista you have to use EVR (either mode). Sadly this H264 DXVA decoder only works with HW bitstream-based decoder (ATI HD series except 2900 and Geforce 8xxx series except the old G80 8800) so your card is not supported.
On final note: Not all H264 files (particularly files encoded with profile higher than level 4.1 like most x264 anime fansubs around nowaday) will NOT work with DXVA1/2 acceleration: green image on Vista or black screen on XP, partial working like wrong frame rates or macroblock every fast moving scene or around edges, some files will even crash your graphic driver or even shoot down your entire system (likely to happen more on XP as Vista has a more robust graphic driver architecture). So in the end to me the best bet now is to buy a good enough processor for your need and use a decent software based decoder if you're a hardcore movie and video viewer. The best software H264 decoder currently IMO is the one comes with Nero suit but you have to buy their suit and an additional plugin, pretty expensive. Better just buy a good processor and use ffdshow-tryout, it has multi-threading now, not as efficient as Nero decoder but good enough with powerful proccessor.

Do i need to set something in the drivers or in the player in order to enable hardware aceleration and play de video properly?

You need an DXVA enabled graphic card, a media player that supports DXVA output (Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra, WinDVD, the one above I mentioned), a DXVA enabled decoder (the ones come with the above player I mentioned) and files that work with DXVA. This is the most tedious requirement as not all files are made by yourself and not compatible with HW decoder (both DXVA and blu-ray/hdhvd player). All files come from blu-ray and hd-dvd will work, files encoded for PC and played on PC then up to heaven.

Also, i have a old pc in my livingroom with windows media center, its a old pentium 4 at 2.4 ghz and a geforce 4 mx 440 128 mb. Whats the most inexpensive video card i could replace with the old gf4 mx in order to view high resolution videos?

At least a Geforce 8500GT or a HD2600 pro (the HD2400 and geforce 8400 sometimes chokes with 1080p/i high bitrate video). A Geforce 7300GT IIRC has partial DXVA acceleration too, like its stronger brother 7900GT.

 

[thuan]

And they worked perfectly, but not on my media center in my living room with a gf4 mx 440 128 mb and a p4 2.4 ghz, so the question remains, which card should i get for this pc, a really unexpensive card that would make 1080p videos run fine?
Or the cpu wouldnt keep up with the card when it comes to HD movies? (720p works fine in it, even on the gf4mx440)

If the files work with DXVA and you have one of the cards I recommended above, CPU usage is near non existent for H264 content, as for VC1 content nvidia uses more CPU (about 20-30% lower than software based) than ATI HW (again nearly zero CPU usage).

 

[dariushro]

Get these :

CoreAVC -multi-threaded x264 codec.
CCCP - but exclude the x264 codec and zoomplayer from it , let CoreAVC do the decoding.
use MPC (media player classic) to play the .mkv file.(MPC comes as part of CCCP so no need to download it again)


VLC sux for playing HD mkv files.

 

[Noya]

Get these :

CoreAVC -multi-threaded x264 codec.
CCCP - but exclude the x264 codec and zoomplayer from it , let CoreAVC do the decoding.
use MPC (media player classic) to play the .mkv file.(MPC comes as part of CCCP so no need to download it again)


VLC sux for playing HD mkv files.

And the winner is...

This guy is right.

CoreAVC is the best software decoder out there. As far as I know, there are no hardware decoders for x264. My dual-core Opteron (2.25ghz) will play 1080p x264 with an average of about 30% CPU usage. My old 2.1ghz AthlonXP will start stuttering with 1080p, but plays 720p rips fine (60%+), so your Athlon64 should be fine.

Your P4 will not play 1080p rips.

 

[thuan]

Well I haven't mentioned CoreAVC. But currently it is slower than Nero 8 decoder by about 20% in my last test and also has macro block problem with certain x264 encodes.