H.264 Hardware Acceleration Not Working

[hasso]

I've got PowerDVD 8 installed along with GBPVR. Running Windows XP SP2 with a GTS8500 card. I've chosen the Cyberlink PowerDVD decoder in the GBPVR config and enabled DXVA... but when I do a playback I still get around 70% CPU utilisation on the dual Core AMD 5200. Yet when I play the same H.264 clip with PowerDVD, CPU utilisation drops to 4-10%, so I must be missing something somewhere that let's me use hardware acceleration in PowerDVD and not in GBPVR. Any ideas anyone?

[sub]

If you're on Vista, you need to be using the EVR renderer to get hardware acceleration. Is this what you're using?

[hasso]

No, this particular machine is a GBPVR client I'm setting up. It's using Windows XP SP2. The hardware acceleration is working when using PowerDVD but not GBPVR.

[sub]

Directshow only officially has support for DXVA 2.0 when using Vista+EVR. DXVA 2.0 is what is needed for H.264 acceleration, but isnt available on XP. Cyberlink apparently has some mechanism which bypass the DXVA layer and allow it to hardware acceleration on some nvidia/ati video cards on XP, and some people have got lucky and had this working in in third party apps on XP (including GB-PVR). I dont personally know what rules go with this unoffical support though, so you might need to do some googling to try and work it out.

[drain]

I've chosen the Cyberlink PowerDVD decoder in the GBPVR config and enabled DXVA...

How did you do about this? The DXVA setting are EXE specific, so you need to edit the registry to enable DXVA explicitly for PVRX2.EXE. Check out this thread.

[hasso]

Great. That link certainly helped. Now I've got hardware acceleration with CPU usage down to <10%! Thanks.

This works fine for VMR9 Custom, but when using EVR I get about two seconds of sound, no video (black screen) and then GBPVR freezes. This is for a Windows XP SP2 machine with .Net 3.0 installed.