Nvidia 8600 cards... does video offloading work with ffdshow?

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by homerpez, Oct 12, 2007.

  1. homerpez

    homerpez Member Guru

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    I'm considering taking my Nvidia 8800 GTS OC out of my "HTPC" computer (so I can play games on another machine instead), and this left me wondering which card I should use for the movie player. I have my eye on the 8600 GTS, which, as I understand it, can offload much of the processing work for H.264 streams.

    So far so good, I can get a card for around $150 that can do something helpful to watching movies, it's modern, all good.

    What I don't know is, will the 8600 accelerate video played only in programs like PowerDVD, or can it accelerate all players?

    Right now, I'm playing LOTS of ~720p material, encoded with H.264, and in a Matroska container (MKV). I can only play these with Media Player Classic, or WMP as a last resort. PowerDVD won't play them, and I doubt the acceleration works on anything but Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or DVD discs.

    Does the 8600 just accelerate h.264 by default? Or can FFdshow be configured to make it happen? Thanks for any help on this, in advance. :)
     
  2. Andrés

    Andrés Guest

    To use Nvidia's video accelerating services you need to use either their own Purevideo software or a compatible player like PowerDVD, which is able to use the hardware acceleration of a Nvidia videocard.

    Anyway, for your information, GeForce series 6 and 7 are also capable of h.264 acceleration if the driver version is 85.xx or above.
     
  3. homerpez

    homerpez Member Guru

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    Well, i do have PowerDVD HD, which I like to use for discs, but I watch tons of fansub anime, a lot of which now are showing up as 720p encodes. For those I like to use a simple player like Media Player Classic.

    Now, I thought that the 8500/8600 series was somewhat unique in that it was the first line to natively support H.264 acceleration... does this mean that maybe my 8800 GTS could accelerate this as well? With the latest Vista driver? (This won't change my project, I'm only curious).

    I've heard that there are ways you can use the PowerDVD filter (and Nvidia acceleration) with other players, but I am having an awful time figuring out how to make it work with FFDshow (which I need to play almost everything else)...

    I have an ATI X1300 Pro card too, which seems to have its own video acceleration. Does that work in a similar way? maybe I can save some $$$$...
     
  4. Mannerheim

    Mannerheim Ancient Guru

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    any 6-y old and newer craphic card can easuly accelerate most videos and when they dont have support. all new cpu from 6-y back can run em.
     

  5. Andrés

    Andrés Guest

    Zoom Player is able to play DVDs using other players' codecs. If you have Cyberlink PowerDVD and Indeo WinDVD installed for example, you may use Zoom Player to play a DVD video stream with the Cyberlink codec and the audio stream with the Indeo codec :). However, I have my doubts about the hardware acceleration part, because under PowerDVD I see options for the Nvidia card that I don't see using the same codec under Zoom Player.
     
  6. homerpez

    homerpez Member Guru

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    Thanks for all the input, everyone...

    On digging and digging on this issue, I discovered the answer to my problem, however it probably means I'm going to get the newer video card (8600)...

    The ATI X1300 card I have does accelerate the codecs I want it to - but only to resolutions less than HD quality (usually around DVD specs). So while this card will give me a picture, it won't do what an 8600 will do.

    I did figure out how to get Cyberlink's codec to play as the default system-wide, which will also activate acceleration (if any). This let me see how my existing cards would work. The ATI card did virtually nothing. Again, looks like 8600 is my choice at this point.

    My 8800 GTS is also accelerating the video codecs, just less efficiently than an 8600 will (more like 10% to 20% offloaded). Really, if I want real acceleration, I have to go with an 8600 GTS or one of the newer ATI cards (but with the 8600 being much better on games in that price range, I think that's my choice).

    Thanks for the info in this, again. Pretty sure which way I'll go now.
     
  7. homerpez

    homerpez Member Guru

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    OK... I'M BACK, with an update, and the burning question again.

    I bought an 8600 GT OC card, got it installed tonight. Seems to work well enough, though with a few issues my 8800 GTS doesn't give me.

    Of course the first thing I tested out was, if I was able to accellerate h.264 with this card.

    In FFDShow, I disabled the "H.264" filter, so by default, it would use what was left (PowerDVD's). I can check this in Media Player Classic, and it says it's using the Cyberlink filter, with hardware accelleration enabled!

    However, on 720p material (and with an E6600 processor), I'm still getting ~30% to ~60% CPU usage - and this is on H.264, which is supposed to be almost totally handled by hardware.

    As a test, I popped in my copy of Transformers, HD-DVD... on full-1080p VC-1, it's always UNDER 30% - so this card IS accellerating in PowerDVD, just not using the PowerDVD filter outside of the program...

    So... is there a way to make this work that I missed? I guess using the PowerDVD playback filter isn't enough?...

    Thanks again for any help
     

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