H264 SD channel problems

[sbiddle]

Hairy,

Oddly changing from EVR to VMR9 Custom lets me watch the H264 trials just fine. The BBC HD channel is now unwatchable (but was fine with EVR) which is a real pain in the arse. ITV HD was showing sod all (as usual) when I was testing last night but assume it's as bad as the BBC one on VMR9. So I've got a bit of work to do to see if I can find a solution where both are watchable. VMR9 FSE gives weird horizontal lines - I say lines, it's more like the half the screen is a few pixels left/right from the rest, giving the appearance of a line.

I'm assuming you're running Vista? Under Vista you must use EVR to enable hardware acceleration, if you use VMR you will not have any hardware acceleration.

H.264 has been a big learning curve. There have been a lot of people here in NZ spend many many hours pulling their hair out trying to get things working well! The reality at the end of the day is that you may as well forget any software based decoders as they will just struggle, particularly if they encounder any 1080i content. A TV3 New Zealand 1080i stream will literally run at ~90% CPU on a X2 5000+ CPU and will still drop frames or give picture imperfections. Use hardware acceleration on an NVidia 8500 and this will drop to somewhere around 5% - 10% depending on any other tasks and give a brilliant picture.

[BigMoose]

Yeah, I'm running Vista64. So that explains why the HD channels (1080i I believe) are only watchable in EVR. Which is a sod if the SD H264 are only watchable in VMR9..! I guess I should be playing around with drivers and EVR to try and fix the SD problems and not bother with VMR9 if 1080i channels will never work.

Do NVidia cards work well with H264 SD/HD? It's a real ****er cause the 780G motherboard is sold as the perfect HD HTPC solution and it was working really rather well with HD H264 and SD mpeg2. Having said that, I only got near perfect results running at 720p. I could never get 1080i @25 working at all usable. SD news tickers look awful, some deinterlacing issue somewhere I've never been able to solve. 1080p is a no no without 1080p50 which I've never sussed out how to get.

I'll report back if I manage to get anywhere with SD H264 with EVR, having not broken everything else...!

[sbiddle]

Yeah, I'm running Vista64. So that explains why the HD channels (1080i I believe) are only watchable in EVR. Which is a sod if the SD H264 are only watchable in VMR9..! I guess I should be playing around with drivers and EVR to try and fix the SD problems and not bother with VMR9 if 1080i channels will never work.

Do NVidia cards work well with H264 SD/HD? It's a real ****er cause the 780G motherboard is sold as the perfect HD HTPC solution and it was working really rather well with HD H264 and SD mpeg2. Having said that, I only got near perfect results running at 720p. I could never get 1080i @25 working at all usable. SD news tickers look awful, some deinterlacing issue somewhere I've never been able to solve. 1080p is a no no without 1080p50 which I've never sussed out how to get.

I'll report back if I manage to get anywhere with SD H264 with EVR, having not broken everything else...!

Unfortunately until ATI fix up their crappy drivers your only solution is to switch to an NVidia video card..:-(

They are well aware of the issue but just don't seem interested in fixing it. The forums for software such as DVBViewer or MediaPortal also have a lot of posts from people in H.264 countries who are all suffering similair issues.

[mattK]

Catalyst 8.7 drivers and the latest 1830 patch for powerdvd8 fixed all of these issues for me. Not sure whether it was the dvd8 patch or the new drivers as they were installed around the same time. Plays all NZ h264 channels no issues cpu usage around 5-10% running ati 2600xt which is similar to the integrated GPU on the 780g chipset.

Hope this helps and works for you.

Cheers
Matt K

[danIrl]

I am also picking up the Irish MPEG4 DVB-T channels.

Can confirm that disabling internal TS-Reader and using the Haali splitter and CoreAVC decoder works fine for me. It will not cut it for HD, but for SD programs it should be fine. I would hold off on any hardware purchases until the real thing is lauched next year.

I am also using the VMR9Custom render, as I have an old ATI 9550 card.

I had hoped that moving to the latest version will allow timeshifting of live recordings... watching a program whilst still recording, but I guess you need to use the internal TS reader for that.

Sub: Can I provide some logs to help troubleshoot the problem?

[sub]

I am also picking up the Irish MPEG4 DVB-T channels.

Can confirm that disabling internal TS-Reader and using the Haali splitter and CoreAVC decoder works fine for me. It will not cut it for HD, but for SD programs it should be fine. I would hold off on any hardware purchases until the real thing is lauched next year.

I am also using the VMR9Custom render, as I have an old ATI 9550 card.

I had hoped that moving to the latest version will allow timeshifting of live recordings... watching a program whilst still recording, but I guess you need to use the internal TS reader for that.

Sub: Can I provide some logs to help troubleshoot the problem?

Yes, you absolutely need to be using the internal reader to play back in progress recordings. Whats not working for you with the internal reader? Make a sample file available for me to download and I'll take a look.

I'd expect you'd need a faster CPU and probably a nvidia 8500/8600 video card if you want to do any HD channels though. The Cyberlink or ArcSoft H.264 decoders are also recommended. CoreAVC has know issues with DVB streams.

[danIrl]

Using internalTS Reader, I get audio but no sound.

Without internalTS, the logs show:
2008-08-15 00:01:55.515 VERBOSE Graph contains the following filters:
2008-08-15 00:01:55.515 VERBOSE - Default DirectSound Device
2008-08-15 00:01:55.515 VERBOSE - Video Renderer
2008-08-15 00:01:55.515 VERBOSE - NVIDIA Audio Decoder
2008-08-15 00:01:55.515 VERBOSE - CoreAVC Video Decoder

With internalTS:
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE Graph contains the following filters:
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - Default DirectSound Device
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - Video Renderer
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - CoreAVC Video Decoder
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - NVIDIA Audio Decoder
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - MPEG-2 Demultiplexer
2008-08-15 00:17:06.140 VERBOSE - SOURCE

Note: The content is MPEG-4.

[sub]

Can you make a small sample .ts file available for me to download and try?

[danIrl]

yes I have one. just trying to figure the best way to get it to you.
do not have access to web hosting...yet!

[sub]

The names escape me at the moment, but there are several free online web file sharing sites. (google turns up names like http://www.4shared.com/, http://www.box.net/, etc)