GPU accelerated and enhanced x.264 MKV movie playback [Guru3D]

One of the most popular file-formats for playback of movies right now is MKV / x.264 We think this format is similar like the early stages of MP3 development. You could use it but there was very little...

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that was usefull article

and to sum it up you need:
1. A GPU - DUH!
2. VLC media player - works well with .mkv and it has GPU acceleration on by default

 

VLC player has always been laggy on all 1080p, and some 720p videos no matter what computer i put it on, i have been told by many people to do this and that and this and that but nope, never ever works, i use VLC as choice of media player.... but Media Player Classic for 1080p has always been a must, and i didn't even know this new media player classic was out, will definitely be trying it out

 

Nice but limited

IMHO, this is part 1 or just half of the article.
To be complete, true Open Source should be added.
There are number of media center options available on OTHER OS.
My favorite (and i think most popular and functional is MythTV).
Why? Not because I hate M$. Just can't find reason to spend 100+ USD on OS when the whole hardware can be less then 200 (30 for cpu, 40 vga, 20-40 ram + the case, HDD and optical)
I do have HTPC that is based on E4400 + Gigabyte mobo with nvidia 9400
chipset pushed into old HP xw4100 case (fits nicely by colors and dimensions my Harman Kardon receiver)
Currently, the hardware acceleration of all video formats supported only by nvidia 8 series and newer with their VDPAU (which is is the Linux equivalent of the Microsoft's DirectX Video Acceleration (DxVA) API for Windows)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU
As it was shown @ Phoronix, this working great with very low end cpu+gpu combination.
From my experience, you don't even need to have multicore CPU to build your HTPC.
Now, back to the reason for the post.
I think people should know about alternatives. Especially when this alternative has same (in some cases better) functionality with lowest price tag.
And don't start about ease of use etc. Mythbuntu is fine example of dedicated distribution which allows you to have media center in less than 60 minutes (actually less than 30).

 

Nice start , but no one mentioned about x.264 level (profile 4.1 , 5.1 ...) and ref. frames which are crucial in this method for decoding such materials. If x.264 re-encoded material has a L5.0 profile or non-restricted ref. frames and few other fuctions DXVA will not work. Newest Nvidia drivers can sometimes evade this but it will not always work ...

More here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123537

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=132924

http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/

http://bluesky23.hp.infoseek.co.jp/DXVAChecker_1900.zip

Bye

 

Thanks!!!

this app is great! + the shader combination in the article made my movies look a LOT better!

 

Doesn't work for me.

 

I don't understand this. 720p is accelerated ok why not 1080p ?

 

Brilliant article, I was just reading up on that problem aswell.

I will be using the Open Source mediacenter MediaPortal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) in the future to use a remote control, it also has DXVA support if you fiddle around a little.

 

damn those shader enhancement are freaking awesome!!!

 

Doesn´t work for me either. A link with a file in mkv an x264 would have been nice. But on the other hand, it shows the disadvantage of this threat. I quote a sentence you wrote in the article about the ion platform:

As easy as that. I tried the GPU acceleration with mov and x264. Mov and h264, mkv h264 . All didn´t work. But because I didn´t find a proper mkv and x264 1080p I´m not sure if the problem is in my system somewhere. The graphicscard should do the trick, cause it has the G92 chip which imo has the VP2 included. DX and drivers r up 2 date.

But thanks for the article anyway.

 

I believe there is something wrong with the denoise filter. It seems to cause ridiculous amounts of CPU usage when open or closing a file (not when playing). And it seems to actually disable all other filters as well. I am not even sure that it is getting applied itself.

 

720p works fine for me in VLC

 

nice, but some artifacts seems to appear on some h.264 videos though, mebbe its just me but when using cyberlinks's H.264 decoder (uses PureVide HD) no artifacts occur (and both only using around 2-4% CPU )

edit: the new shader effects are awesome

 

Working beautifully! Thanks Hilbert.



Edit:

A couple of comaprison shots I just made, just standard quality jpg but you can still see the quality difference is quite remarkable.





Using the most efficient cpu based decoder (coreavc)






Using mpc's gpu based decoding (Hilbert's method)

 

@BlackZero
You should check the Input/Output levels (luma range) in coreavc decoder because without any post processing software and hardware (DXVA) decoding are equal.

@All
As it was said before there are some limitations on the h.264 DXVA usage mostly due to the number of reference frames. Since ForceWare 178.24 NVIDIA GPUs can decode L5.0 streams as well. Use MediaInfo to check those details on you videos.
Use VMR9 Renderless with XP and EVR Custom Presenter with Vista.
If any additional processing filters (like vobsub) are added to the graph DXVA will not work.
I recommend Haali splitter as has less bugs than the internal Matroska splitter.
You can get fresh builds of MPC-HC here (currently offline at time of this post), they are build from the SVN repository.
Beliyaal has made a build from the SVN but with extra enhancements that will be added to the SVN when proved to be stable, get here.

The main forum where me and some other guys discuss MPC-HC is here, check it out.

Latest SVN build is rev 990 and latest Beliyaal build is rev 988 + patches.

Hope this post helps you guys.

P.S.=>CoreAVC 1.9.0 added CUDA support to decode the videos using your NVIDIA GPU but I think that the implementation is different from DXVA as DXVA uses DSP logic inside your GPU to decode the videos and CUDA uses the GPU power to do the decoding (it's software video decoding but using the GPU).

 

mpc already has gpu accelerated. I got low (2-8%) usage cpu while I watched video w/60 fps and w/ h.264 or x.264 but I got up to not 60 fields/s . I got up to 60 fields/s in powerdvd. how do you change 25 or 30 to 50 or 60 fps for new mpc???