H.264 DXVA (Hardware Accelerated) decoding in VMC

aphillippe

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Ok, here’s the problem. I’m trying to get hardware accelerated decoding of 1080p h.264 .mkv files (rips of my own Bluray and HD-DVDs) within vista media center. The files will play nicely in WMP with 5% CPU usage with no problems, so there’s nothing wrong with the files as far as I can see. If I try to play them in media center (through My Movies plugin or in the Video Library) I get a black screen and 5 seconds of AC3 audio, then it cuts out. Nothing.

I’ve done a lot of googling and the only suggestion I have found is to adjust the merits of the H.264 codecs installed using Radlight filter manager until Cyberlink H.264 codec is used by default in Graphedit. The problem is that Cyberlink has always come top in the merit order, as it is being used by WMP. Graphedit confirms this. I’ve disabled the FFDshow H.264 decoder and don’t think I’ve got any others installed. So, does anyone know how to force VMC to use a particular H.264 codec, specifically Cyberlink?


Thanks in advance for any help.


Specs:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H (onboard ATI HD3200)
Athlon 4450
2Gb ram
 
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Thanks for the reply, that decoder utility only affects the MPEG 2 codec. I need t change the h.264 (MPEG 4) codec.

Anyone else got any ideas?
 
The only codec i know for DXVA and is free is this one MPEGVideoDec.ax which is available for download HERE its perfect for the ATI in your system as it accelerates H.264, AVC and VC-1 codecs only problem i am not sure if you can intergrate it into VMC i use it in kmplayer and have tried it in MPC-HD and it works perfectly.
 
Problem solved! I had seen the MPCVideoDec.ax standalone filter mentioned elsewhere too, but didn't really want to add another codec if possible. But as a last resort, I tried it. Works perfectly. I'm getting 5-10% CPU usage in VMC, selecting all my rips from My Movies. Thanks a lot for the help.

By the way, I did have one other issue. While testing all of the rips that I've just finished, repeated playing, stopping, playing the next file, after about 5-6 files VMC would come to a chugging halt. I checked in task manager and it was using 1400MB of ram. The only way to free it up again was to end the process. I don't know if this is to be expected, but it's kinda worrying. I know I'm asking my poor little system to do a lot, repeated loading and playing of 1080p files, but I don't want to have to do a process restart every time I play 5-6 Blu-ray rips.
 
Problem solved! I had seen the MPCVideoDec.ax standalone filter mentioned elsewhere too, but didn’t really want to add another codec if possible. But as a last resort, I tried it. Works perfectly. I’m getting 5-10% CPU usage in VMC, selecting all my rips from My Movies. Thanks a lot for the help.

By the way, I did have one other issue. While testing all of the rips that I’ve just finished, repeated playing, stopping, playing the next file, after about 5-6 files VMC would come to a chugging halt. I checked in task manager and it was using 1400MB of ram. The only way to free it up again was to end the process. I don’t know if this is to be expected, but it’s kinda worrying. I know I’m asking my poor little system to do a lot, repeated loading and playing of 1080p files, but I don’t want to have to do a process restart every time I play 5-6 Blu-ray rips.

Could i ask how you installed it in VMC as I previously used it in MediaPortal but am now evaluating VMC and would like to try it again, but can't see how to integrate it.
 
Could i ask how you installed it in VMC as I previously used it in MediaPortal but am now evaluating VMC and would like to try it again, but can't see how to integrate it.

Sorted it now... copy the .ax file to the System32 folder and then run regsrv32 mpcvideodec.ax eh voila!
 
Guys can someone pls elaborate on how they got VMC to use this new DXVA codec? Can you do it via ffdshow.

I am using ffdshow w/ haali splitter. When I go into ffdshow config, codecs, I cannot see it as an option. How do I add it?

Or does this break ffdshow / turning it off. I would like to keep ffdshow as I watch a fair bit of foreign language stuff and anime so I like having ffdshow+mediacontrol plugin for subtitle and audio stream control. Also I have a lot of MKVs which have the subtitles encoded, but if its an English film I don't want them on, etc. so basically I need to keep subtitle control WITHIN media center via mediacontrol plugin, that in turn relies on ffdshow.

FYR I am using sharky007's vistacodec package w/ x64 addons in vista x64.

Geeze this stuff is far more complicated than it should be :)
 
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Guys can someone pls elaborate on how they got VMC to use this new DXVA codec? Can you do it via ffdshow.

I just followed the instructions, exactly like Scott_Mac describes. It puts it top on the merit list for h.264 decoding. You don't need to add it to FFDShow, just disable FFDShow for H.264 and it should just worked.

I need to keep subtitle control WITHIN media center via mediacontrol plugin, that in turn relies on ffdshow.

I use mediacontrol, but only for the resume button. This still works fine, even though FFDShow isn't decoding the file. I don't know if it would break the subtitles playback. Only one way to find out...


Geeze this stuff is far more complicated than it should be

Yup.
 

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