HD Radeons are now decoding .mkv's too in hardware

Kaotik

Kaotik

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Can't remember seeing this mentioned anywhere so far, but anyway for what it's worth, HD Radeons are now decoding h.264 (x264)'s in .mkv container aswell

Easiest way for this is getting Media Player Classic Home Cinema:
http://tibrium.neuf.fr/
The site features both 32bit and 64bit builds, I'm using 64bit myself on Vista 64bit Ultimate, I can't confirm it's working under XP, haven't read too much about it for that platform.

I don't have sadly any heavy samples to use, but I got few clips re-encoded from HD-source to 720p / DVD5 for full length movie.
In case of such file, the CPU time on Q6600@3.33GHz floats around ~1-4% no matter how heavy action packed scene there is.
Same scenes on WMP11 / Haali Media Splitter combo utilize my CPU at around 25-35%, so there's a clear difference even on such low bitrate example as mine.

Some people have had apparently some problems with it, so what I did to make it work?
Simple:
1) Start Media Player Classic Home Cinema
2) View > Options > Playback/Output: make sure EVR (Vista / .Net3) is selected for DirectShow Video
3) View > Options > Internal Filters: Enable all
4) Play the file using Media Player Classic Home Cinema
 
Cool, thanks. Seemed to work fine in XP too. Noticeably faster than FFDShow on my old-ass HTPC with some Apple trailers I had lying around. Now I'll have to go find some 1080P content to try out as that was always far out of reach for that setup previously.
 
Wow good to know. I watch all my anime in 720p .mkv container h264 encoded and I have never checked CPU usage...of course I do have an Nvidia setup but my curiosity has been peaked about my CPU usage. Good info though!
 
Sorry if this is a stupid question but why does the container have anything to do with hardware acceleration? If it decodes H.264 it should do so for all container formats no?
 
trinibwoy said:
Sorry if this is a stupid question but why does the container have anything to do with hardware acceleration? If it decodes H.264 it should do so for all container formats no?
Click to expand...

I don't think it should, if it was only about h.264 decoding I shouldn't for example need Haali Media Splitter to open .mkv's in WMP, since FFDSHOW can decode h.264 / x264 etc
 
This decoding solution seems container agnostic to me (i.e. renamed QuickTime HD worked) as long as the MPC-HC can open it *without* additional DirectShow filters (using the built.in ones). I haven't messed around too much, but using external filters to split the individual streams from the container might yield unpredictable results as especially XP is extremely prone to filter soup when building the DirectShow graph/chain and misbehaving individual decoders screwing things up.
 
Zaphod said:
This decoding solution seems container agnostic to me (i.e. renamed QuickTime HD worked) as long as the MPC-HC can open it *without* additional DirectShow filters (using the built.in ones). I haven't messed around too much, but using external filters to split the individual streams from the container might yield unpredictable results as especially XP is extremely prone to filter soup when building the DirectShow graph/chain and misbehaving individual decoders screwing things up.
Click to expand...

Yes the decoding itself in this case is, but not in case of for example using PowerDVD simply because it can't open those files.
I should have been more clear, the software should be able to decode all h.264 (x264 etc ) content as long as it can open the container, but all the players supporting hardware decoding can't open all the containers.
 
Ah, sure. But that's because those software vendors are bastards looking to propagate said proprietary filter/decoding mess by (for instance) using hacks to prevent other programs to access their filters or hooking a different splitter into the filter chain. That's just because they're evil (or perhaps to stay friendly with the AACS-LA/MPEG-LA), not for any good technical reason...
 
With the Media PLayer Cinema v1.1 that I am running...running 720p anime in full screen my CPU usage is about 5%...does that mean that Nvidia's cards are capable of decoding h264s in .mkv containers as well?
 
suryad said:
With the Media PLayer Cinema v1.1 that I am running...running 720p anime in full screen my CPU usage is about 5%...does that mean that Nvidia's cards are capable of decoding h264s in .mkv containers as well?
Click to expand...

I've been trying to get some video accel to compare both cpu and quality (vs. ffdshow postproc, deband and vanilla-mpc bicubic interpolation upscaling).

I use RMB click on the playing video -> Filters -> "MPC Video Decoder", i always get DXVA enabled and not in use. Guess im not getting the right kind of files.
 
Well, i always use Media Player Classic and/or VLC for my occasional video playing needs when MCE doesn't cut it, but this thread gave me a motive to try out MPC Homecinema's image quality when using the EVR filters.

So, i hooked up my laptop via HDMI to my 32'' LCD TV as i always do, fired up an instance of MPC and another of MPC HC (this one with the same settings that Kaotik mentioned earlier), with both windows side by side and... wow.
What have i been missing ! Not only it's silky smooth, but MPC HC's image quality puts the standard MPC/VLC/ffdshow to shame.
I guess having a 8400M GS with that "hacked" 174.93 driver (Vista, 32bit) really does payoff.

CPU utilization is not quite as low as his, but then again, it's only a T7300 (2.0GHz, 4MB L2), and he's using an OC'ed Quad-Core.
Still, well below 15% (and that is a peak number). Thanks, Kaotik. ;)

Of note: It's sad Quicktime .mov videos are still not accelerated in MPC HC. The default option crashes the player, while the DX7 and DX9 options don't seem to take advantage of Purevideo HD yet.
At least that Star Trek XI 1080p teaser doesn't drop frames anymore, so it's good enough.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I am sorry, but you guys really need to get your concepts straight. Does the topic of this thread actually mean to suggest that the Radeons have hardware support for splitting a matroska file?

Matroska is a container, it can hold many different video and audio streams encoded with a wide variety of codecs.
 
Bludd said:
I am sorry, but you guys really need to get your concepts straight. Does the topic of this thread actually mean to suggest that the Radeons have hardware support for splitting a matroska file?

Matroska is a container, it can hold many different video and audio streams encoded with a wide variety of codecs.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's what I was getting at with my post above. It's the software that does the stream extraction from the container.
 
Yes, and Kaotik demonstrated again that he really doesn't know what this is about.
 
Bludd said:
Yes, and Kaotik demonstrated again that he really doesn't know what this is about.
Click to expand...

Even though the topic might lead you to think that, you're demonstrating here your lack of reading capabilities if anyone is demonstrating anything.

In my post, the very first sentence clearly says that it's decoding h.264 in .mkv container too now, which none of the other players (before this anyway, afaik) could do.

edit:
I do admit that the topic is indeed misleading though, but nowadays h.264 is definately the most popular codec used with matroska container
 
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