CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[barcoed]

Folks,

I’ve been playing MPEG-2 BD discs with KMPlayer / AnyDVD-HD / Reclock and Haali with very smooth results. Yesterday I played an H.264 on the same setup (dual core 2.8 / XP Quadro FX 3400) and noticed that the % processor used had jumped from the (MPEG-2 BD) average of ~33% to ~80% and that on big pans the picture was tearing and juddering quite noticeably. Change the video rendered to something a bit more basic (RGB surface) and the tearing goes away (but the picture isn’t quite as good and a little bit jerkier).

What gives?

[greg_mitch]

Does that vid card offer HW acceleration? Most likely a driver issue. Try a different player?

[barcoed]

The Vid card is supposed to be a bit of a beast and works beautifully for all DVD and MPEG-2 BD.
I'm running the latest everything including the XP patches and NVidia drivers (and Powerstrip).

MPC-HC is even worse - unwatchable.

I wonder if I will need a slightly more modern vid card with H.264 specific hardware decoding - and then will the players / filters / some other bit of software required, recognise / use this extra hardware?

Nothing's ever simple is it?

[akajester]

I use a group of codecs specifically made for MediaPortal but uses MPC-HC as it's base player. It's called SAF (stand alone filters) and can be found here. The first page has all the directions to install and configure it.

Anyways, I use the latest version of haali with mpc-hc. I have an ati 4350 and catalyst 9.7 drivers and experience none of those problems! Have you checked what other codecs you have installed? Perhaps something is loading that shouldn't. For instance if you load the video in MPC-HC and run graphstudio you can see exactly how the video is rendering. If you have anything other than the codec and video renderer in the video path dxva will die. For instance subtitle loading will kill your dxva. You can disable the auto loading of subs in haali config or in directvobsub if it's installed.

Just a few pointers. Again, that first page of the SAF thread will teach you a few ways to troubleshoot these types of problems.

From the sounds of it, dxva stopped working which would cause the cpu jump. what video card is it specifically and does it support dxva?

-akajester

[barcoed]

Thanks for that but I don’t fancy installing MediaPortal (which appears to be a prereq).
In an act of desperation I changed from the Haali rendered to EVR (thought I'd tried that already but maybe not) and I have super smooth playback! No tearing, no judder – all fine. The processor is up there in the high 80s but the picture is fab!

However, as is the way of things, I now have to alter gamma between DVD / BDMpeg2 and BDH.264 as they vary in apparent brighness (which they didn’t with Haali).

Ho hum.

[akajester]

Actually you can extract the files from SAF and manually register them using regsvr32 from the command line. That way you get all the codecs you need, register them manually and use mpc-hc for playback. I've heard good things about the EVR renderer, i'd just rather not complicate an htpc with vista, so I'm running xp yet.

[barcoed]

[Mark_A_W]

Use madVR instead of Haali renderer. Perfectly smooth with Reclock (unlike Haali), and no tearing (if your graphics card is up to it).

But you will have to ditch KMPlayer for Zoom Player or MPC-HC.

[huggy]

Mark is right, Madvr undoubtedly has the smoothest playback.This was evident on the opening scene of Apocalypto,with EVR playback was smooth however,you could notice the slight jerkiness on the very slow pan.Madvr however,was absolutely beautiful to watch,perfectly smooth panning and flawless playback.



Dave

[barcoed]

OK - I'll check it out with MPC-HC.

Should I use the Beliyaal build or is that in the main version now?

Ta.

[BobbyBlaze]

How do you set up MADVR for smooth playback? It's like a bloody slideshow on my machine (q6600 oc'd, ATI 3870). Can someone share with me what boxes need to be ticked because I LOVE the IQ on MADVR. It looks amazing but I've never been able to get it to run smoothly. Really appreciate some assistance here.
Cheers,
Rob

[Mark_A_W]

I dunno.

I have a Q6600 at 3.0ghz and an Ati 2600XT, with MadVR at stock settings (except for levels) I get smooth playback of all material, bluray MKVs included. And I'm running it on a secondary monitor.

[BobbyBlaze]

S'okay Dude, got it fixed now (but thanks for the reminder to have another crack at it). (had to disable RGB output in favour of YV12 in FFDShow for any other head scratchers out there).


WOW! I now realise that I've never seen SMOOTH playback b4 using madvr. Really, really impressed with it. Almost hypnotic.

[Mark_A_W]

Ahh. With only RGB output enabled in ffdshow, you weren't using madVR. madVR only works with YV12.

[BobbyBlaze]

I had yv12 & rgb32 enabled. I was using Madvr (could tell by the renderer list and the picture quality. It has a different look to Haali) but it was about 1 fps. By disabling rgb32 as an output option it starting running up to spec (and jolly good she looks too).