780G owners' advice wanted.

[Pob]

I have a virgin PC with 780G mobo and X5600 CPU, to use for GBPVR.
All I have installed on it is three OS's in a tri-boot:
XP SP3, XP 64 SP2, Vista Ultimate 32-bit. I was going to make it quad-boot with Vista 64-bit, but decided that was OTT!
I would like input form anyone who has built a 780G HTPC. I cannot even decide which OS to use! Hence the multiple boot options. I have read the posts about trouble getting hardware acceleration working with H264 videos, and I really don't know where to start.
I have not installed an OS from scratch for a decade. I upgraded Win98 to ME, then upgraded ME to XP I have changed mobo and CPU many times, and always done a repair install of 98/ME/XP to get them working with the new hardware. It seems so daunting to start with a clean slate. Now I have three clean slates! So if you have a 780g system working well with PVRX2, what are you using?

[Koenie]

I stick with XP for the time being, can not see what Vista is offering extra.

Make sure you install the drivers from your motherboard manufacturer. The drivers are clearly not mature yet which is probably what has been causing problems for some people. I own the Gigabyte and have had not issues at all except for the resume from S3 sleep state trough USB but this is a windows issue and happens on many machines (Gigabyte has the patch on their driver cd).

I can not really comment on H264 as I am not running full HD and anything lower the machine handles with ease anyway.

[Pob]

Yes I am discombobulated by all the different threads on hardware acceleration working / not working on the 780G mobos. This thread:
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=35398
Looks good, but unless I am being dense I can't see what OS the OP was using to test...
I think Vista is a safer bet for HA of H264 content, but the question is if the HA works in GBPVR - which looks harder to acheive.

BTW it had been my first experience of Vista, and for the life of me I cannot see what it has to offer? Sure, the Aero scrolling windows look good, but I don't buy PC's just to look at the OS all day! No one buys a car to look at the engine instead of driving it! When it comes down to functionality it seems to offer the same as XP, nothing extra, but even after just one hour I was getting very annoyed with the constant pop-ups;
Do you really want to go into the control panel? Do you really want to go into device manager? Blah blah blah. Imagine if your car did this:
Do you really want to open the door? do you really want to start the engine? Etc etc etc.

[csy]

Vista is a technology update, designed with scalability into the future. The frontend user experience is still very similiar to XP, but the backend is redesigned.

I'm running Vista Home Premium SP1 32bit and 64bit on the Gigabyte 780G mobo, with GBPVR and Cyberlink powerDVD8 Ultra, and have full HA on H.264 HD and MPEG2 SD.

In my case, installation was very simple, it all worked "out of the box" so to speak, however I acknowlege other have had difficulties.

The key to H.264 HA is DXVA2 on EVR. This is native in Vista.

[Pob]

Using the guidelines from the post I linked to above, I am getting full H264 acceleration in PVRX2 on Windows XP, using any mode other than EVR - some tweaking still needed I think as would be nice to have it in EVR. Microsoft are meant to be releasing a new OS in 2009 - Vienna? So perhaps Vista is not so scaleable into the future.

[gazoo]

I'm the one with all the crazy 780g threads. I have both 780g machines, one with XP and one with Vista Ultimate 32. I wasn't a big fan of Vista, but after using it for two weeks, I have to say it's OK. It hasn't failed on me yet. I probably wouldn't use for a desktop just yet, but it's getting there. I would definitely use it for an HTPC.

Also, the HA is working much better on Vista than on XP. I can't get XP to do ANY HA at the moment, but Vista at least does it on H.264 with this board. The following MPCdecoder does HA inside and out of GB-PVR using EVR only in Vista. Cyberlink does it outside, but not inside GB-PVR. That is due to Cyberlink defaulting each time to NO HA, but the apps like WMP and such can make it switch on. For GBPVR, you have to do a reg entry but it doesn't seem to work with Cyberlink 8. MPEG2 doesn't look like it's working for me on HA, but the percentage isn't that great at all anyway so I don't care.

Hope that helped.

[Pob]

Well it is interesting tinkering with two new installs simutaneously. Using the MPC method alone did not result in good results for HD playback except in overlay, but after installing the 'proper' Matrovska Splitter.exe and disabling the MPC built-in filter it is very good. As stated previously, hardware acceleration works in XP on all renderers apart from EVR, but I installed the old faithfull CoreAVC, and the CPU usage is still very low anyway in EVR.

In Vista, Hardware acceleration works in all modes using the MPC method. But I still ended up using CoreAVC and the CPU is only 8-10% with 720p.

So many hours wasted, and I have ended up with the same setup as my old PC on both XP and Vista - EVR renderer, CoreAVC for H264, and FFdshow for audio. I guess the lesson is that if you have a newer CPU, HA is not an important factor. Many of us are just so used to trying to get HA working on our older rigs, to get acceptable performance...

The holy grail would be for something like the Cyberlink decoder to work properly in GBPVR, because it balances HA between the CPU and GPU, where MPC simply passes everything to the GPU (which is why you get almost no CPU usage when using it), but for now I will stick with CoreAVC and let the CPU do the work.

[gazoo]

I'm beginning to think I have something wrong with my XP box since I've had so much trouble with it. I gave up and I'm using coreavc on XP so no big deal since my CPU can handle it.

MPC H.264 on vista worked fine for me without adding the matroska stuff because I installed Klite megapack and it loaded some kind of mkv splitter in there already.

[Pob]

A weird thing - since I went back to using CoreAVC for HD stuff, it seems to still be using some kind of HA in XP, as the CPU usage is so low(8%). If I change the renderer to EVR in XP, where I know the HA definately does not work, then the CPU usage goes up to around 20%. This is the reverse of what I used to get in XP, as EVR used to use less CPU.
All very confusing! But I am getting superb results now in XP and Vista, by doing the following:
Registered only Mpeg2DecFilter and MPCVideoDec filters from this thread:
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=35398
Installed FFdshow (ensuring H264 and Mpeg2 decoding disabled)
Installed Matrovska splitter 1.7.401.3
Installed CoreAVC - using this in GBPVR for H264 decoding, and in the CoreAVC configuration set deinterlacing to 'Hardware'. Perhaps it is this offload of deinterlacing to the 3200 that is helping...
Anyway with this setup now get great results with all renderers - apart from the elusive EVR under XP.

[gazoo]

Pob,

I can't get MPEG2 HA to work on Vista, but I haven't tried that MPC mpeg codec though. I'll have to give that a shot. I think someone else on here is also having Vista MPEG HA problems too.