PureVideo Decoder Question(s)

[zed]

I have the Nvidia PureVideo decoder installed and selected in the Playback config tab but how can I be sure it's actually being used?

When I play an mpeg file using WMP, the icon shows in the system tray, per the Nvidia documentation (http://download.nvidia.com/Windows/dvd_d...02-223.pdf)
but when playing a file with GB-PVR there's no icon.

Is there something else I need to do or does the icon not show with GB-PVR?

[sub]

There are some situations where the icon does not show. You can check by looking in the gbpvr.exe-native.log file after video a video or live tv - it'll list the filters used, which should contain 'nvidia video decoder'.

[zed]

Doh!...I shoulda thought of looking there. :o

It shows this:

17:17:44.996 VERBOSE Graph contains the following filters:
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - Default DirectSound Device
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - Video Renderer
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - NVIDIA Video Decoder
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - NVIDIA Audio Decoder
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - GB-PVR Flow Status
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - GB-PVR Parser
17:17:44.996 VERBOSE - SOURCE

so I assume it is indeed using the one I told it to.

Thanks for the quick (5 minutes) answer...

[sub]

Yep, that shows its using the nvidia audio and video decoders.

[largelumox]

zed, not meaning to hi-jack your thread, but are you happy with purevideo?

If so what are your settings?

I'm still experimenting, and find I can get smooth playback with VMR9, but aspect ratio acts somewhat weird...garbage on certain sections of the screen etc....as reported elsewhere.

VMR9 custom clears up any aspect ratio issues, but sometimes seems to stutter... I am using an nvidia 7600GS with AMD 64 3400+ and 1gb ram

[zed]

It seems to work well so far. I tried a bunch of different decoders and this one seems to look best to me and has the lowest cpu usage on playback of any I tried. I'm probably not as picky as some other folks here, tho. I have a 6200 card feeding NTSC to a Toshiba RPTV via s-video. I just took the defaults as recommended in the PureVideo doc...let it decide what's best. Overlay seems to work best for me. System is a homebrew 3GHz P4/HT with only 512MB. Definitely not a butt-kicker system but it meets my needs.

[Braklet]

zed, not meaning to hi-jack your thread, but are you happy with purevideo?

If so what are your settings?

I'm still experimenting, and find I can get smooth playback with VMR9, but aspect ratio acts somewhat weird...garbage on certain sections of the screen etc....as reported elsewhere.

VMR9 custom clears up any aspect ratio issues, but sometimes seems to stutter... I am using an nvidia 7600GS with AMD 64 3400+ and 1gb ram

Out of the 4 or 5 decoders I tried, PureVideo gives me the best video quality WHEN IT IS TUNED correctly. Tuning was not easy or deterministic, and it seemed to depend a lot on program source.

When I was watching only SD video on DVD and from my PVR500 card, VMR9 Custom seemed to work best for me. However, these settings always resulted in stuttering HD video after I added an ATSC tuner card. I switched GB-PVR to Overlay mode and now it stutters only when SD video is piped through an HD stream. (HD on the same channel works fine.)

Other decoders either resulted in terrible video (bad color reproduction, pixellation during haze/smoke, etc.) or stuttering/frame drops.