DXVA hardware acceleration w/ free open source howto

[Elmo Putney]

EVR gives such a better playback and eliminates any tearing that I went to Vista just for it. On Vista I see sub 10% playing back 1080p content on 780g.

I've been considering doing exactley the same thing, which version of Vista would be the minimum required? I obviously dont want to spend more than I need to.

[gazoo]

I've been considering doing exactley the same thing, which version of Vista would be the minimum required? I obviously dont want to spend more than I need to.

I have ultimate, but I would think home premium would be good as well. I'm not as familiar with the others like basic and business. I happened to have an extra license laying around or else I would have gone home premium.

[Pob]

EVR gives such a better playback and eliminates any tearing that I went to Vista just for it. On Vista I see sub 10% playing back 1080p content on 780g.

Sub 10% CPU usage playing H264 content seems the norm with the 780G - in XP or Vista. The only exception is EVR on XP where the HA does not work.
However I get perfect results in XP using VMR9 FSE now, with no tearing at all. If I did get tearing, I would switch to Vista (I have Vista Ultimate as a boot option), but there is simply no need for it.
The one elusive thing seems to be MPEG2 hardware acceleration in any renderer, on either XP or Vista. It seems crazy to have 6% CPU use playing a 1080p H264 file, but 13% playing a TV recording or watching live TV!
Going back to the OT of this thread, it is interesting to play with the MPC Home Cinema stand-alone player. I found by expermenting on XP that
HD H264 files get full hardware acceleration in VMR9 (CPU just 2-3%), but not EVR - no suprise as EVR is not an official XP renderer. The really interesting find though is that MPEG2 files DO seem to work with hardware acceleration in EVR on XP! I was getting CPU usage of 2% playing a GBPVR recording, compared with 13% in VMR9. In fact the MPC home Cinema player seems to struggle playing MPEG2 content in VMR9 -the picture is sort of juddery, I assume because of the HA not working properly, and PVRX2 cannot play TV or Mpeg2 at all if the MPC decoder is used with VMR9 - just get a black screen.
Then the next suprise - there is one mode where H264 and MPEG2 both play with full hardware acceleration on XP; VMR7!
Why? Who knows? And the problem for us is that PVRX2 does not support VMR7...
There are very long forum threads about the ATI HD cards, inluding the 780g, not accelerating MPEG2 - see
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthrea...st11622510
But so far I have not found a definitive registry settings guide explicitly for the 780G HD3200 chipset.
The DXVA_NOHDDECODE looks interesting for HD MPEG2 content...
But with a fast CPU this is all moot - 13% in not exactly taxing - but perhaps it's my imagination, but I always think the picture is better when you get HA - maybe with HA you get better deinterlacing? Anyway, if someone can find a registry tweak guide for the 780g boards, please post the link!

[gazoo]

Sub 10% CPU usage playing H264 content seems the norm with the 780G - in XP or Vista. The only exception is EVR on XP where the HA does not work.
However I get perfect results in XP using VMR9 FSE now, with no tearing at all. If I did get tearing, I would switch to Vista (I have Vista Ultimate as a boot option), but there is simply no need for it.
The one elusive thing seems to be MPEG2 hardware acceleration in any renderer, on either XP or Vista. It seems crazy to have 6% CPU use playing a 1080p H264 file, but 13% playing a TV recording or watching live TV!
Going back to the OT of this thread, it is interesting to play with the MPC Home Cinema stand-alone player. I found by expermenting on XP that
HD H264 files get full hardware acceleration in VMR9 (CPU just 2-3%), but not EVR - no suprise as EVR is not an official XP renderer. The really interesting find though is that MPEG2 files DO seem to work with hardware acceleration in EVR on XP! I was getting CPU usage of 2% playing a GBPVR recording, compared with 13% in VMR9. In fact the MPC home Cinema player seems to struggle playing MPEG2 content in VMR9 -the picture is sort of juddery, I assume because of the HA not working properly, and PVRX2 cannot play TV or Mpeg2 at all if the MPC decoder is used with VMR9 - just get a black screen.
Then the next suprise - there is one mode where H264 and MPEG2 both play with full hardware acceleration on XP; VMR7!
Why? Who knows? And the problem for us is that PVRX2 does not support VMR7...
There are very long forum threads about the ATI HD cards, inluding the 780g, not accelerating MPEG2 - see
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthrea...st11622510
But so far I have not found a definitive registry settings guide explicitly for the 780G HD3200 chipset.
The DXVA_NOHDDECODE looks interesting for HD MPEG2 content...
But with a fast CPU this is all moot - 13% in not exactly taxing - but perhaps it's my imagination, but I always think the picture is better when you get HA - maybe with HA you get better deinterlacing? Anyway, if someone can find a registry tweak guide for the 780g boards, please post the link!

You seem to be stuck in the hell that is HA that I gave up on a few months back. Someone posted the other day that the new ati drivers might actually get xp to work ok. I will be looking into that once I get back from my business trip.

[Pob]

No, I am not stuck in any hell!
Using the excellent original post in this thread by Rwalker, I get such great H264 results in XP - using FSE - that it has stopped me moving to Vista - simply no need.
I just think it's odd having higher CPU use playing MPeg2 than H264!
*I did have a hiccup this week when H264 files stopped playing. At first I was blaming the MPCVideoDec.ax, but it turned out to be caused by a decoder I installed - illiminable oggcodecs. Somehow it stopped all my Matrovska files playing. Deleted it and all back to normal.

[Pob]

Another self-correction! The issue of H264 video not playing - just a blank screen - using the MPC stand-alone decoders only happens after the 780g PC comes out of standby (S3). If the PC is rebooted then it works fine.
I think this must be an issue with the 780g chipset, rather than the decoders.
Because of the intermittent nature of the problem - and seemingly random behaviour, this problem has had me on a right royal goose chase!
But now I know the issue, I can replicate it at will; H264 works fine - put PC into standby - resume - blank screen playing H264. Reboot PC - H264 works again...
I am using the 8.452 catalyst drivers from Gigabyte. The only issue I could find by googling was that HDMI connection is lost after resuming the 780g boards...

[Dava]

That is interesting and something for me to try again when I get the chance. I do put my machine to sleep after 5 mins of inactivity so that could well be my issue too although I am sure it did not work after a clean boot either.

However, I WILL now be doing a clean install as my 3 week old, 500GB Seagate drive just failed and is back for return. I wil try the original post in this thread without any any other codecs and see how I get on. I will then make a restore point and back it up to another system.

[pBS]

anyone have a readout of dxvachecker with those codecs on a file?
load up a file in dxvachecker and play it with that codec and see if you have *both* decoder and processor devices being used..
as far as i know that's full accelleration..both decoder[idct/mc] and processor[deinterlacer] hardware being used...
you can try all decoders in both evr and vmr9 to see results and cpu usage at bottom..
funny thing is, some codecs that utilize both aren't as smooth as some that only use processor device, as in my cyberlink codec works great for blu-ray, but has slight stutters when used for mpeg2, but ffmpeg and ati avivo seem to be fine,tho only avivo utilizes both hardware devices...ffmpeg still seems the smoothest even tho it has around 40% cpu usage compared to avivo at <20%...

so basically full hw decode isn't needed for mpeg2, deinterlacing will do, on just about any cpu...[tried with 1.6 celeron/ati 3450] decoding is easy w/cpu, but have to have hw-deinterlacing...
will let you know about h264 with ffmpeg soon, just got files to test..

just a note, the new catalyst 8.11 drivers rock! finally all tearing gone...
bout time, it's been over a year...lol

fyi the new 4xxx cards suffer from the tearing issue...same driver..3xxx works great tho!
[just tried a 4550 an 4350 and both ignore any setting for vert refresh..tho 3xxx also ignores any changes to setting also, but it's stuck in 'on' instead of 'off', we need 'on' always to avoid tearing]

[carpeVideo]

Another self-correction! The issue of H264 video not playing - just a blank screen - using the MPC stand-alone decoders only happens after the 780g PC comes out of standby (S3). If the PC is rebooted then it works fine.
I think this must be an issue with the 780g chipset, rather than the decoders.
Because of the intermittent nature of the problem - and seemingly random behaviour, this problem has had me on a right royal goose chase!
But now I know the issue, I can replicate it at will; H264 works fine - put PC into standby - resume - blank screen playing H264. Reboot PC - H264 works again...
I am using the 8.452 catalyst drivers from Gigabyte. The only issue I could find by googling was that HDMI connection is lost after resuming the 780g boards...

For issues like this I have had good luck using devcon.exe to restart devices after standbye (e.g. firewire and sometimes my IR remote). Not sure it would work with a graphics card but it might be worth a try.

CV

[martint123]

I've used devcon in the past to reset a video card and it worked ok.
The only problem was that once in a while it reported that it needed rebooting to take effect (same happens rarely with my nova-t-500 tuners).

But if you are doing this from a wake script then you can use devcon -r restart ????? to let it reboot if required.