Very poor H264 playback with Coreavc 2.5.1

[ddichiera]

I'm experiencing very poor H264 playback with Coreavc on two different WIN 7 x64 systems.

 

When I start DVBV the video freezes for quite a few seconds and then starts with a very low framerate and then usualy settles down to an adequate playback. If I then go to full screen, the problem returns and often never goes away, in which case I have to shut down DVBV and re-start.

 

Sometimes it's playing ok and I shuttle back or forth and the problem returns and doesn't go away...

 

If I change to another codec (Windows DTV-DVD or PDVD10) the problem doesn't occur. Changing bewtween WMR 9 and EVR doesn't seem to make much difference. Toggling Aero doesn't change either.

 

I loaded the latest drivers for the graphic card on one system (nVidia FX570 - ver 275.36) and now the problem is worse.

 

One PC is a 3.2 GHz dual core and the other is a Dell workstation with Xeon quad core 3GHz.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[dvbrewer]

I'm experiencing very poor H264 playback with Coreavc on two different WIN 7 x64 systems.

Is this for interlaced 1080i, it is no good for that, even the newer version. see here.

[ddichiera]

Thanks for the suggestion; I used Google translate and think I understood the link.

 

I'm trying to playback BBC HD which is MBAFF (mixed interlace and progressive) and probably the hardest of the lot, although CoreAVC does claim to be MBAFF capable.

 

What's throwing me is that nothing seems to be maxing out; CPU never goes above 15% and GPU up to 75% (GPU memory 60%)

 

If I switch off CUDA and DXVA then the CPU only goes up to about 20-25% but playback is still poor.

 

Has anyone had good results from other codecs?

 

Dominic

[desweil]

try cyberlink decoders

[ddichiera]

Thanks,

 

I already have PDVD 10 and I'm not impressed with it on this type of material. It's ok on VC1, but not on BBC HD stuff. When the picture is still it's sharp, then when there's movement it suddenly goes "soft". This switching in and out is very uncomfortable to watch.

 

I have Mainconcept installed as part of Adobe CS4, but it won't work and I can't work out how to get it to work.

[desweil]

have you enabled DXVA for the cyberlink codec? If you do, then the grafics card will handle deinterlacing. I do not see how that would differ from coreavc with dxva activated.

[ddichiera]

Thanks for that tip as well. It was set to SW now set to DXVA; the softness seems to have gone away, but now it's just playing jerky (average 21fps in full screen mode). BTW what does HW mean?

 

This is really frustrating, I don't have a useable system at the moment.

 

Tomorrow I'll try swapping the video card to see if that improves the situation.

[SimonP]

Try DivX too. I find the DivX Decoder Filter gives me good results with BBC HD.

 

(HW = HardWare?)

[ddichiera]

Ah ha!

 

DivX H264 codec does quite good job - thanks for that. It's the only codec out of nine registered under DVBV that plays back without judder. GPU usage is fairly constant at about 30% and CPU from 25 - 30% with all four cores evenly balanced.

 

Is there any way to get rid of the logo bottom right? Can one buy a logo free copy for a reasonable price?

 

BTW for reference, I've been reading up and the FX 570 card is not really suited to video playback, so I'm going to upgrade to an nVidia GT 440 soon. I'll report back here when I make that upgrade.

 

Dominic

[SimonP]

Is there any way to get rid of the logo bottom right? Can one buy a logo free copy for a reasonable price?

Yup, buy it although it fades away quite quickly. The Codec Settings control panel includes a box to untick that gets rid of the logo but I'm not sure if it works in the trial version.

[ddichiera]

Today I set up another PC with DVBViewer and have had interesting results.

 

The new PC is just a standard HP business desktop (DC7900) with a Core 2 duo @ 3GHz, Vista x86 and on-board graphics (Intel Q45/Q43 chipset)

 

I set it up with both Divx H264 and Coreavc decoders and they both work quite well. There's no noticeable judder on either codec and EVR reports a steady 25fps for both. Although they are very slightly softer than the Dell Workstation setup, (CPU is about 50%) the results are perfectly acceptable.

 

Of the two systems I'm having problems with, one is the same hardware as this one, except it has : Win 7 x64, Radeon HD4350 graphics card. Lots more system ram

 

The thing that jumps out at me immediately is that the two PCs I'm having problems with both use add-on graphics cards and Win7 x64, which suggests to me that either add-in cards have a significant overhead in transferring data compared to on-board graphics, or it could be a problem with x64 drivers.

 

I'm almost tempted to swap out the system drive and try an x86 install to see if it's a x64 problem.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[SimonP]

Strange that you're having so many problems, my system plays films quite sweetly. FYI it consists of:

 

Asus motherboard, Intel C2D 2.66, 4GB memory, ATI HD3650 graphics and Windows 7 64bit - so actually less powerful than yours. I use either Zoomplayer or DVBViewer to watch movies, with either DivX or PowerDVD10 codecs.

 

Watching a 1080p movie uses a lot of processing power as ATI graphics cards don't support DXVA very well but it's completely smooth.

[ddichiera]

For the benefit of anyone else reading this thread,

 

I'm at the point now where I have "acceptable" playback using CoreAVC on BBC HD programmes. In order to get there, I've had to turn off all Acceleration (CUDA and DXVA) and set de-interlacing to Hardware/Aggressive.

 

It's still not as good as I would like, so will be ordering another graphics card to replace the FX570 which is really designed for 3D CAD work rather than HD playback (it only has 48 cuda cores with 512MB ram and I'm told that CoreAVC needs a minimum of 96 and at least 1GB memory).

 

The other two PCs: one has a HD4350 which plays acceptably, as does a win7 x86 build with on-board GMA x4500 graphics.

[SimonP]

Have you tried replacing the FX570 with the HD 4350 to see if that fixes it?

 

The FX570 uses PureVideo technology so it should be OK for HD. Update the drivers and try some more codecs first, I alternate between DivX and PowerDVD10 but both work well.

[ddichiera]

I was going to, until I discovered that using DXVA acceleration in either system gave severe banding (about 6 or 7 different horizontal shades across the screen) and as the HD 4350 only uses DXVA, I didn't see the point.

 

BTW I have to correct: the FX570 only has 256MB not 512MB.

[dvbrewer]

I was going to, until I discovered that using DXVA acceleration in either system gave severe banding (about 6 or 7 different horizontal shades across the screen) and as the HD 4350 only uses DXVA, I didn't see the point.

 

BTW I have to correct: the FX570 only has 256MB not 512MB.

As I stated at the top, CoreAVC is no good for interlaced TV, whatever hardware you use, you need to use the Microsoft DTV-DVD decoder included in Windows 7 or Cyberlink PowerDVD included in the Shark codec pack (select PowerDVD as default H.264 decoder in Shark settings).

Edited June 18, 2011 by dvbrewer