MKV h.264 Hardware Acceleration DXVA

[ExtremePC]

Found an interesting program today called Media player Classic Home Cinema.

http://tibrium.neuf.fr/

This program will play MKV's with proper DXVA. I tested several MKV's today and even during the heaviest scenes the CPU barely reached 10%, awesome.

Problem is, how can I adapt this to work with VMC? You can download the player or the individual filters, but how would you then configure them?

Worth a look anyway

Media Player Classic is a phenominal media player, I like it even better than VLC, however I don't believe its possible to replace the VMC media player.

[kiffies]

So now we know it's possible. Does it work with 1080P?

Yes it does!

It's a weird player though, completely self contained. In other words you don't have to install it, you just run the .exe- it's a about 6 meg and contains all the files, filters etc.

So it's not like you can install it and then configure VMC to use it, because you don't install it to run it if you get my drift.

Other problem is, you can't have any other filters between it and your GFX card, ffdshow for instance.

I wish the ffdshow team would hurry up and get DXVA working

[yansen78]

from my experienced, for my rig i'm using AMD 64x2 4400+ with 2 Gb memory and Gforce 9600GT. firstly I could not play the transformes 1080p properly due to slow and picture breaking up. later on i donwloaded the Nvidia Pure Video decoder and installed it on my pc. guess what? after that i can watched Transformes 1080p .mkv file with WMP 11 without any problem at all. everything is smooth and flawless..

[Severus606]

All I do for mkv's is just renaming it to avi.

Don't do this, you risk severly messing up your graphs as you're making the system think you have x264 in an AVI container, when you don't, you have x264 in an MKV container. Fortunately WMP is usually smart enough to properly handle this but there's no guarentee other players, transcoders, etc, will, nor that this "functionality" won't be broken in the future.

You should instead add .MKV to the list of supported media extension types for WMP. Something that you can conveniently do with a single mouse click during the CCCP installation. And yes, CCCP is a codec pack, its a stable and tested FFDshow tryout, Haali and a VobSub if I recall correctly. If you're anal about codec packs you can manually install the component parts. CCCP's chief advantage is that they actually test the various builds included, so you get some guarentee of stability. They also don't perform the kinds of lunacy often found in other crap codec packs such as including multiple codecs for the same video type (ffdshow + native xvid codec for example).

I wish the ffdshow team would hurry up and get DXVA working

This will most likely NEVER happen. FFDShow is a DirectShow wrapper for the ffmpeg (and similar) codecs. None of the codecs in question are DirectShow aware, and as such, none of them can leverage DxVA acceleration. So basically if DxVA is a dealbreaker for you, you need to look at native DirectShow codecs, FFDShow will never do this for you.

The reason MPC works is because its not using FFDShow, its using (its own?) DirectShow codecs, and thus is quite happily able to do DxVA offload. The issue we have is that the MKV splitter of choice, Haali, is currently unable to properly hand off an x264 stream in most instances to the DxVA-leveraging codecs such as PowerDVD. Once this is fixed, the problem should go away.

Its not so much a case of FFDShow not supporting DxVA being the problem - as there's no reason to expect it to - as much as its a case of the splitter being unable to communicate with the DxVA-aware codecs. So what we really need is a new splitter!

[krypto]

Severus606, thanks for the explanation.

I use the straight ffdshow and haali builds (I used to use the vista codec pack.)

From what you are saying, is it better to use CCCP?

[kiffies]

Does anyone know whether the Gabest splitter would do the trick?

[mackysm]

I've been trying to get GPU hardware acceleration to work as well using PowerDVD 7 Ultra's direct show codec, but at this current stage there is an issue with MKV files which result in either :

1) Max 20FPS if the h264 is 720p encoded
2) Black screen with audio if the h264 is 1080p encoded

As per this post it seems to indicate an incompatibility with the Haali splitter and Cyberlinks software.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=131795

To get WMP to attempt to use the PowerDVD 7 codec, you need to ensure the following (Then you'll be at the same stage as me)

1) Compatible Video Card with h264 decoding ability ie 8500/8600/8800 or relevant ATI (I'm not sure about ATI as I've got a Nvidia 8500GT)
2) PowerDVD 7 or 8 Ultra. Its the only one with a directshow filter support that would work with WMP and hence MCE. Note it has to be Ultra as Deluxe does not have the codec or at least GPU acceleration gets disabled.... Dispite what NVIDIA toute as PureVideoHD support in the drivers you still need to buy expensive software.......
3) Upto date Nvidia Drivers. ie 163.75 or higher for XP, and the latest for VISTA.....
4) WMP with VRM9 or EVR enabled... WMP10 requires a patch to enable this....WMP11 works if you tick the correct options ie options --> performance---> advanced. Tick Video Mixing Renderer and Use High Quality Mode.
5) Haali MKV splitter, so you can read MKV
6) Disable/remove all other h264 codecs and hope/pray that WMP picks up the Cyberlink h.264 codec. This is why its not recommended to install codec packs. If you have ffdshow installed open the video options and disable the codec for h264 and as long as the Cyberlink codec is the only other one installed it should be used. You can confirm this by doing a properties from the file menu and it tells you the codec its using for video/audio once the mkv is playing also I believe graphedit will do the same.

Also I've read a few posts that seem to indicate that GPU acceleration will only activate if the h264 is encoded correctly with certain settings that match the offical specs for 1080p/720p. So if the h264 is not encoded correctly your out of luck..... Isn't DRM wonderful.....

Finally other people have reported a bit of success with extracting the video/audio out of MKV and putting them in another container like AVI, but I'm probably not gonna bother going down this path...

[kiffies]

Anyone got any updates on this?

[logifuse]

Been a while since I read the thread, but I've got CoreAVC 1.7/Haali & 720p MKVs use about 20% CPU (4850e).

Justin

[kiffies]

Is hardware acceleration being used though?

[dgaust]

No, but at 20% cpu usage does it matter?

[kiffies]

Well yes, sort of- the title of the thread is "MKV h.264 Hardware Acceleration DXVA"

Anyway, have you tried any 1080 files?