EVR Problems on XP - Anyone have it working?

[tjb]

It worked for me w/XP with very little effort, however, it apparently killed the hardware acceleration I enjoy with the purevideo decoder & 6600GT card.

With purevideo and hardware acceleration, scrollers and sports events look just like they do with a live feed. Without it, scrollers are blurred/difficult to read and sports events are motion blurred and have almost a slow motion look to them. VMR9 Custom works well for me.

FSE or not FSE doesn't seem to make any difference on my setup, video quality is exceptional either way. I haven't monitored CPU utilization, although I know it's pretty low either way.


From what I've found on my system, it's almost unwatchable without hardware acceleration - not because of dropped frames, tearing, or other nasty problems, but because of the blurring issues mentioned above and the general drab appearance of the video. The CPU utilization on my 3ghz system is acceptable either way, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the difference in video quality is night and day with hardware acceleration vs no acceleration.

Yes, I would run VMR9 Custom if I could, but I get a lot of stuttering. VMR9 FSE gets rid of the stuttering, but I have problems with GBPvr taking over the entire display. Maybe i just need a better video card, cause I upgraded my PC to a Core2 Duo, but it still has the 6600 with AGP interface.

[86atc250r]

My 6600 is AGP as well - it's in an older 3.06ghz Northwood system.

I had to do A LOT of tinkering to get the system to where it is today. To actually get the Purevideo decoder working in GBPVR I had to play with a lot of settings, then play a sports event or something w/scroller & compare how it looked in WMP (which seemed to always use purevideo) to GBPVR. It was a fairly difficult and sometimes frustrating process knowing how good the video could look but to not be able to get GBPVR to look that good. For what ever reason, if you didn't have the exact set of settings GBPVR wanted, it wouldn't use the purevideo decoder and would default to something else.

To rid myself of the stuttering, I had to find a version of quartz.dll that my system liked. Before I got that resolved, I would get stuttering sometimes after channel changes and sometimes not. Sometimes I would have to restart the video several times before it would play cleanly and even then, sometimes would stutter for apparently no reason.

Today I have no issues at all with video quality or stuttering - the system works great.

If you want to try, I can post the version of quartz.dll I settled in on after I get home this evening, although, different people have found that different versions of quartz.dll worked better for them.

[86atc250r]

Also - seems like any time I update nVidia drivers or Purevideo, I have to play around with things and change settings until everything starts working properly again.

My GBPVR system has been running the family's main TV for right at two years now, I pretty much leave it alone as far as drivers go & update GBPVR itself when Sub issues a new release.

[tjb]

If you want to try, I can post the version of quartz.dll I settled in on after I get home this evening, although, different people have found that different versions of quartz.dll worked better for them.

Thanks for the offer, but I have already changed the quartz.dll file. My problem is probably better described as dropped frames rather than stuttering. Before I upgraded my mother board, I couln't even run in FSE mode without dropping frames (the old MB had a AGP 4x interface). The new one is 8x and now FSE mode is completely smooth, but I ill cannot achieve this in VMR9 Custom.

I may try a test install of Vista to see if I can get EVR working, and to compare it to FSE. Problem is, my DVR is now in "production" mode. My wife likes it so much that I seldom get time to play with it anymore.

[stustunz]

This is probably a stupid question, cause I'm not very hardware lieterate - but if I install Vista will I get DXVA 2.0 acceleration or is this only available on newer display cards. I have a NVidia GEForce 6600. Could this display card be the reason I cannot get EVR to run under XP?

this is not a silly question i know for sure the 7xxx(not 100% on the 7xxx cards read some more) and the 8xxx cards with vista will do dxva 2.0
from my understanding its directx 10 so your card wont work
but someone else may have more to say

[86atc250r]

You've got other problems if you can't run full screen video without FSE mode on the hardware you've got.

FWIW, I'm running a lot less powerful hardware than you (on an even older OS - XP upgraded from win2k upgraded from win98 -talk about asking for trouble, LOL!) an old 845pe mb with a P4 3.06 Northwood, 512mb RAM, and a 6600GT AGP card @ 4x and have no issues with stuttering, frame loss or anything else. CPU occupancy is low and I can even run a lot of background tasks without any trouble (i.e. transcoding & streaming to the web, etc).

Quartz.dll isn't an easy one size fits all fix - you have to try several versions. In the sticky thread there are numerous posts about versions that have worked for various people - I tried all of them, most didn't work for my setup. You also have to be sure windows doesn't replace the dll with the original version behind your back, because it will.

Compare your video quality in WMP full screen vs that of GBPVR. My guess is you won't have any frame loss issues in WMP. Also compare color saturation and motion blur on things like scrollers. If you get more blur in GBPVR you've liklely not got the purevideo stuff working properly.

If you're dropping frames in WMP then you have something in the background causing problems either processor or something killing the hdd performance - find it and kill it. Also check that your HDD is not running in PIO mode. If you want to check hdd performance, download hdtach and compare against some of their examples.

Throwing Vista at this problem seems a little drastic, especially considering you'll likely open up a whole new can of worms.

Good luck.

[tjb]

If you get more blur in GBPVR you've liklely not got the purevideo stuff working properly.

Maybe that's my problem. It didn't seem to me like there was that much to getting Purevideo working properly. I select PureVideo in teh GBPvr setup for the video and audio renderers, select hardware acceleration, and I have found that selecting VMR Stretch for deinterlacing seems to work the best. Is there more to it than this?

Also, WMP plays smooth all the time, but I believe that it is using overlay mode. GBPvr plays quite nicely in this mode also, but alas, will soon no longer be supported.

Besides hardware, it may also be a difference in the resolution we are running. I tried this system on a smaller LCD TV running 13xx x 768 and had much better success. However, I am running at full 1920x1080 resolution (1080i) - my TV does not support 720p mode. If I lower the resolution out of the display card than I simply get a smaller picture on the TV.

[tjb]

this is not a silly question i know for sure the 7xxx(not 100% on the 7xxx cards read some more) and the 8xxx cards with vista will do dxva 2.0
from my understanding its directx 10 so your card wont work
but someone else may have more to say

Thanks for the advice. In the future I may start looking for a video card upgrade. My current MB supports both AGP and PCIe. Good to know which boards support directs 10.

[frankmcg]

Only the 8xxx series supports dx10 so would recommmend one of those if you're looking at upgrading. The 8500 is a particularly good buy for an htpc IMO, particularly if you get one with passive cooling.

[frankmcg]

evr and xp has no hardware acceleration
that said if you use the latest intervideo codec the cpu usage is very low
i tried it but because the hardware accel didnt work its not ideal
sorry to say fse is still the best option for good playback

Still haven't got EVR working for mpeg playback but tried it out on a few avi files. Couldn't tell the difference in colours to be honest, but noticed a bit of the dreading tearing. Went back to FSE after that (this is on an x2 4200 and an nvidia 8500 for info).