MKV h.264 Hardware Acceleration DXVA

[dgaust]

Interesing, I'm running a 512mb version of the Asus 8500GT, and it worked fine.

I actually went back to running ffdshow though, I wasn't sure the picture quality was quite there with the MPCVideoDec decoder.

[Murdock80]

I have to agree in regards to the... "bestest mostest hidden piece of amazing information of the intermanet, ever."

Great work, thanks for all the effort.

I still got a couple of minor issues when trying to get this to work still, maybe you guys can help me out.

AMD 2350BE CPU, ATI HD3200 GFX, WinVista32

I set up the .ax file and set the decoding options via Radlight.

CPU% when playing a 720p MKV in MPC went down to an amazing 2-5%.

When I tried playing a 1080p MKV, the WMP wouldn't show a picture at all, only sound- playback was fine within MPC though.
Acceleration didn't seem to kick in with MPC though, CPU usage was up between 80-95%- the file itself might not have been compliant for acceleration maybe.

Strange thing but: Why is there no picture within WMP?

I ran Graphedit and checked the two MKV files- and to my surprise, two decoders popped in before the video renderer: MPC Video decoder and FFDShow Video Decoder, even though I disabled AVC/H.264 in FFDSHOW. I couldn't add otherdirect show filters to Grapehedit manually to experiment a bit, Graphedit would just crash / close itself when I clicked on the list :/

I also tried running the mkv files via Arcsoft Totalmedia Theatre, but it didn't seem to accelerate them at all- which doesn't make sense to me as TotalMedia Theatre is able to play BluRay with proper acceleration (at least the 720p file is compliant, it worked fine with dxva in WMP/MPC).

For starters, it'd help a lot if there were a possibility to check which codecs are actually being used/loaded when playing a media file via WMP, MPC, Arcsoft etc..
You guys know how I could check that?

Thanks in advance..

[AngryIbis]

I tried this, and it works well for MKV files, however when I play H264 AVIs encoded with MCEBuddy the video is jerky - not stuttering, but it looks like it is replaying a 1/4 second of video twice - every second or so. ie someone moving their arm up would do it in a series of jerky, backwards and forwards little motions until they stopped moving.

If I go back to ffdshow, everything is fine, but my CPU usage is up. Is there something I'm missing or are my files not encoded properly?

[Murdock80]

Well, I'll have to bug you guys with this again, I'm kind of stuck with my tests..

I kept playing around with different codecs and settings to find the best results for my system.

First of all I switched to "GraphStudio", a GraphEdit alternative-- since GraphEdit kept crashing on my system when I tried to manually select DShow Filters.

I completely removed FFDShow since one of it's video codecs kept on popping up automatically in Graphedit as well as Graphstudio when I rendered a mkv movie.

I've got the following codecs installed for testing purposes:

CoreAVC
ArcSoft TotalMedia
MPC HC (set up for DXVA, h264 decoding)

Rendering a 720p mkv file in Graphstudio as well as playing it in WMP works just fine-- the DXVA kicks in and the CPU usage goes down to 4%-5%. When clicking on MPC's properties in Graphstudio, it even mentions that acceleration is being used.

A certain 1080p mkv is not being accelerated at all, cpu usage bounces back and forth between 55% and 100% (MPC properties in GS show "No acceleration..") Its initial encoding settings obviously prevent DXVA as stated in earlier posts in this thread.

Now comes the bit thats causing me headaches.
Another 1080p mkv flick that I render in Graphstudio is also being shown as "No acceleration" in the MPC properties and the CPU% shows a heavy load of of 60-100%.
When I play the exact same movie with WMP, the % is down to 6-10%. I kept playing around with this setup, but the results always came back the same (DXVA in WMP/VMCE, no DXVA in Graphstudio)

Now... what's up with that?

I'd really appreciate some hints here as to why the DXVA is not kicking in when playing the movie via GS (MPC codec), but obviously it is via WMP. Similar to my earlier question: Is there a way to find out which Codec and/or settings WMP is using in the "background" when playing a file?

--
Other experimenting showed that in terms of No-DXVA playback, CoreAVC is vastly superior to MPC and Arcsoft. Arcsoft didn't pick up DXVA with any mkv that I tested (around 10%-15% more CPU load than Core), MPC had around 15-25% more cpu load than Core (it even lost audio synch when not using DXVA and skipping through one of the 1080p movies).

Keep in mind that my system specs affect these "results".


I'm seriously considering just upgrading to a Phenom X3 (and undervolt it...) to avoid more stress going into this. I was hoping that my ATI HD3200 would provide enough power/background to simply accelerate HD content and support the low-power CPU, but appearantly this is not the case-- especially because certain settings have to be considered when encoding HD movies in order for them to "apply" for acceleration.

Thanks for any help or even feedback from your results