Seeking the grail

[Kristan]

I have (from one I now read, a rather lemon like) 780g based gigabyte board, with a 4850e athlon running XP & gbpvr. I have managed to get it to the point where 99% of the stuff I run I'm happy with. Most video is fine, I get no tearing and I'm a happy boy. However, I have two issues left and need help!

The first is playing ISO's - I've installed daemontools "lite" from their website, pointed gbpvr at the correct folder & drive, but when I hit play on the iso, I just get a black screen for 20 seconds or so and then dumped back to the videos menu. Where am I going wrong?

The second is the one which I suspect is going to cause me some pain...
I have a two 1080p videos that play, but the audio drops out of sync after the first few seconds, ocassionaly totally drops then comes back out of sync again (like 5-10 seconds or so). Framerate playing seems ok (no choppyness), and the processor is running about 70-80% (so not maxed out, but I'm also assuming not using HA). Watching them in MPC I can see the jitter climbs and climbs and seems to match the delay in the audio. I'm guessing this is due to my box not having enough horsepower for the video, but I'm confused as other 1080p stuff plays without a hitch and when watching, it doesn't seem to drop more than a frame every few seconds or so.

Is the answer to get HA working on the 780g? Is this even possible? I'd really rather not have to add another gfx card, as the whole point of this was that it's energy efficient and almsot totally fanless..

As an aside, I was thinking of replacing my PVR-150 card with an Nova S2 HD card. Am I a glutton for punishment....?

[pBS]

what decoder are you using to play them, and where did they come from?
are they mkv? what type audio? what audio decoder? renderer? audio renderer?

for the iso problem, i'd skip daemon tools lite and go with elaborate bytes Virtual Clonedrive...

but i'm pretty sure the newest versions of DTlite just need an adjustment on commandline as they changed some stuff from the original..

[pBS]

also, i'm curious what the core and memory speeds are on 780g...
[it shows them in info screen in ccc]

[Kristan]

Regarding codecs, I have to admit I'm not 100% sure - I just installed the latest CCCP build as it's always "just worked" on my other PC's, so FFDShow is what I use for most decoding. For the renderer, I found the only thing that would solve my tearing was to run WRM9 fullscreen exclusive in gbpvr, but I've tried all different modes in MPC and it didn't seem to matter which I chose.

One of the files is an MKV, the other is an iso of a BD disc, mounted under dtools and using MPC to play the m2ts file. Graphedit shows ffdShow audio and video decoders being used for both, but with VobSub in there too (I'd quite happily bin that off tbh if I knew how ).

CCC shows :
Memory size : 700mb
Memory type : HyperMemory
Core Clock : 500Mhz
Memory Clock :400Mhz

Thanks

[pBS]

yea, it's probably vobsub messing it up...it's a tricky one to uninstall, but there is help out there somewhere...like a .reg file or something to get rid of it...
it tends to 'inject' itself in every graph you run when it's installed..
normally not a problem, but obviously has an effect on performance..
search on removing vobsub and i'm sure you'll find some easy instructions...

and more to your point, what version catalyst are you running? try 8.11with vmr9 fse and see what happens to video and cpu...
with cyberlink codec it should be best available...smooth,8% cpu on blurays...
mpchc video decoder[free] shows same cpu but not quite perfect on blurays yet..[very occasional glitches]
ffdshow on h.264 should play it ok with output colorspace set to *only* nv12 and 'set interlace flag in output' checked..tho not fully hardware accelerated, halfway accelled...

also make sure to have the latest ffdshow...
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ffdshow...081219.exe

[Kristan]

Well I've removed vobsub and graphedit now doesn't show it, however the jitter is still huge, and it doesn't seem any different. I've tried changing the colourspace on FFDShow (latest verison) to just NV12, however unless I have some entries in the RGB settings (RGB32 for example) it won't render at all. CPU is still at 75% while doing all this btw.

I also can't see a way to force MPC HC to use it's own DVXA 264 decoder - I've tried enabling it but it doesn't seem to make any difference to CPU usage.

I'm running CCC 9.1 I think (whatever the current latest is). Is it worth going back to 8.11?

ARGH!!!

[pBS]

oh yea, 8.11 works a treat, i couldn't get anything past 8.11 to work, and i've heard others with problems with even 8.12...i haven't had a chance to test 9.1 yet but it seems same as 8.12... maybe better for 4xxx owners tho...

oh and mpchc has separate decoders available... the MPC Video Decoder is the one for h.264, it also does divx,etc...look on props pages
..
info on dxva w/mpchc http://tibrium.neuf.fr/DXVASupport.html

MPCHC H.264 + mpeg2 dec + mpegsplitter http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles..._id=264678
probably also worth dl mpeg2dec and mpegsplitter also...

and get ffdshow beta6 and set like pic below..
oh and use libmpeg2 instead of avlibcodec for mpeg2 codec and make sure on codec page that the tyypes you want are selected..
otherwise that codec pack may have hosed things too much...
[codec packs are NEVER a good idea...full of hackers warez and bad tech.]

[Kristan]

Grail found

Just for reference incase anyone else runs into this, this is what I did :

1. Uninstalled the CCCP codec pack
   
2. Uninstalled FFDShow
   
3. Uninstalled CCC 9.1 drivers
   
4. Installed CCC 8.11 drivers
   
5. Installed FFDShow beta 6 (as above)
   
6. Installed MPCHC filters as described above, but ALSO the MPC Video DEC filter (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mpc-hc/...g_mirror=0
   
7. Disabled FFDShow from decoding H264
   
8. Used radlight filter editor to set MPC Vid Dec's merit to +1, and FFDShow to normal
   

Running in VM9 there's no tearing, and processor sits at about 5% while watching HD content.

Oh, and it looks like the Daemon tools thing might be a bug in gbpvr config - turns out no matter how many times I saved the path and set the driver letter, it wasn't saving it to the config.xml. Manually edited and worked fine. Very strange.

Anyway, I'm a happy boy

Now, about that S2 card....

[pBS]

Glad ya got it sorted..after beating my brains in for years, when they finally fixed the drivers, everything just worked and almost nothing stops it...pointing *directly* to ati drivers as the reason it never worked in the first place.
oh it almost worked, but the critical parts that weren't were the driver, and no amount of tweaking or different modes/codecs would change it..they were all handicapped by the ati drivers not working right..

there is a reason no one was putting out 'media boxes' or computers made for anything but MCE...[MCE didn't do HD and even then only mpeg2] so they never absolutely needed accelleration...
but hd video really needs it, even if just for deinterlacing support which only higher end processors can do entirely in software...

now the EEE minpc is out with a HD3450 card in it,[as opposed to a 780g based system but really same capabilities] which i'm gonna get whenever they come on market here..

now that i got the formula down, i'm trying to spread the word...

Next:
$100 will get you a bluray drive...works great on this w/powerdvd7 or 8

[mvallevand]

now the EEE minpc is out with a HD3450 card in it,[as opposed to a 780g based system but really same capabilities] which i'm gonna get whenever they come on market here..

I am planning to wait for the NVIDIA Ion before making a purchase decision, but if we are talking the Holy Grail, I personally believe you will want better than Atom N270 CPU performance for the long run.

Martin