NV and H.264 acceleration ?

[sharangad]

BTW, i see that 7800 GS AGP8x is supporting H.264 and WMV9 in high definition on that link you just gave us.

Maybe you're looking at a cached copy of that page:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

Here's a screen capture of the part which pertains to the AGP cards:

Perhaps you'd like to tell us where it says WMV9 decoding?

 

[INKster]

Perhaps you'd like to tell us where it says WMV9 decoding?

Bah, who cares anyway ?

It's not like theres a whole lot of WMV-HD content out there...
I mean, how many HD windows media 9 videos do you have ?
I had to get a trailer off MS's website, because i don't have any other source for such material.
WMV in standard definition is easily decoded in software on this old rig, so it's irrelevant.


To me it's much more usefull to have HD MPEG-2 hardware decoding (for HD-DVD and Blu-ray drives), as is to have H.264 High Definition hardware decoding for Quicktime content, and that is widely available

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

To me it's much more usefull to have HD MPEG-2 hardware decoding (for HD-DVD and Blu-ray drives), as is to have H.264 High Definition hardware decoding for Quicktime content, and that is widely available

HD-DVD and Blu-ray both allow for high def WMV and H.264 so there will soon be a whole lot of content that you will wish you had hardware acceleration for.

 

[INKster]

HD-DVD and Blu-ray both allow for high def WMV and H.264 so there will soon be a whole lot of content that you will wish you had hardware acceleration for.

Most new releases of HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies will be encoded in MPEG-2, because most studios don't want to take another expense in changing from MPEG-2 for DVD's and digital projection.

By the time they switch to any of the MPEG-4 based codec's, my little media center will be nothing more than a shoe box or something, but that is still years away...

And hey, an old 6600 AGP with hardware MPEG-2 and H.264 decoding in Hi-def resolutions is more than enough for me.

For gaming i have an Opteron 165 and a 7900 GT 512MB...

 

[chavvdarrr]

I may have spoken too soon. There's no image corruption with hardware accelerated H264. However, the CPU goes through the roof. Before for the 1080p "The Greatest Game" trailer, the CPU utilisation fluctuated between 60-90%. Now it consistently hits 100%.

confirmed , coreAVC rulz

 

[sharangad]

Most new releases of HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies will be encoded in MPEG-2, because most studios don't want to take another expense in changing from MPEG-2 for DVD's and digital projection.

The first HD-DVD titles released are all in VC-1 ( WMV HD ). The first Blu_ray titles released will be in MPEG-2 HD, with some studios planning to use the same VC-1 or H.264 master for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

 

[Asher]

I've got a 7800 GS AGP8x, and I can confirm it does do WMV acceleration (using Forceware 83.24 and 90 betas).

 

[sharangad]

I've got a 7800 GS AGP8x, and I can confirm it does do WMV acceleration (using Forceware 83.24 and 90 betas).

That's not what this guy found:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=869445&postcount=15

( This was with Forceware 84.xx )

 

[Asher]

Are there different revisions? My CPU usage dropped dramatically with the acceleration turned on...

 

[sharangad]

Are there different revisions? My CPU usage dropped dramatically with the acceleration turned on...

How exactly did you turn the acceleration? To disable the acceleration, go to WMP10/11, Tools menu, Options, Performance tab, advanced and untick the "Use Video Mixing Renderer." That's how you disable hardware acceleration.

If there's a significant difference in the CPU utilisation between overlay and VMR High Quality mode then yes, your acceleration is working.

If this is with WMP10, you need KB888656 from here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888656 ( Microsoft beta patch for WMV HD decoding )

WMP11 comes with the patch built in, so you don't need it and just need to switch to one of the VMR modes.

 

[asicnewbie]

sharangad, you seem to be the expert in NVidia/H264 playback. I have a Geforce 6600GT (PCIe) on an AMD X2/3800+ (NVidia Detonator drivers 84.56), Win/XP Pro SP2.

In Nero Showtime 3.0.0.1,AVC-playback (in Showtime 3.0.0.1) appears to work properly. Turning on hardware-acceleration causes the info-readout to say "AVC (hardware accelerated)", versus plain "AVC". CPU-utilization decreases, though not as much as I hoped for. (I can play 1080p files, so I guess I can't really complain.)

On the other hand, if I try to play an MPEG-4 ASP file from Nero's Digital site (Greatest Game trailer "Cinema" and "AVC" profiles), hardware acceleration is broken.

With the options box "hardware acceleration" clicked ("enable"), the video-window is solid grey! The info-readout suspiciously shows "AVC (hardware accelerated)". I thought MPEG-4 ASP and AVC were different codecs?

If I unclick the Options box "hardware acceleration", then the video plays normally. The info-readout says "MPEG-4" (instead of AVC). Is this a bug in Showtime 3.0.0.1, or did I misconfigure something? CPU-utilization is roughly the same (actually, software-mode uses sligtly less CPU.)

Forgive me if this was already mentioned, but you can download more HD AVC trailers from http://www.davestrailerpage.co.uk. (Most of these are direct, saveable links to Apple's hosted trailers.) Some of the more recent trailers have higher peak bitrates.

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

I thought MPEG-4 ASP and AVC were different codecs?

They are completely different. ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) is basically what DiVX has been based on for years and is a profile of MPEG4 part 2 video. AVC (Advanced Video Coding) as you know is both MPEG4 part 10 and H.264.

 

[sharangad]

In Nero Showtime 3.0.0.1,AVC-playback (in Showtime 3.0.0.1) appears to work properly. Turning on hardware-acceleration causes the info-readout to say "AVC (hardware accelerated)", versus plain "AVC". CPU-utilization decreases, though not as much as I hoped for. (I can play 1080p files, so I guess I can't really complain.)

On the other hand, if I try to play an MPEG-4 ASP file from Nero's Digital site (Greatest Game trailer "Cinema" and "AVC" profiles), hardware acceleration is broken.

Nero lists their "The Greatest Game" trailer in several different formats. I don't actually have Nero showtime, as I use the nVidia build of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 6. PowerDVD can only playback one of those files ( "TheGreatestGame_HD_AVC.mp4" ), I think it's the AVC file. This file plays back perfectly with PowerDVD6, though the other versions of it from Nero's showcase don't playback with it and there is hardware acceleration with PDVD. On the AGP 6600 GT, the CPU reduction for this clip is minimal ( though there is a drop ), with a sharp rise in kernel time. I also happen to have a PCI-E 7600 GT at the moment and despite being in a slightly faster CPU (Sempron 64 ( 3400 ), at 2.0 GHz as opposed to an Athlon 64 ( 2800 ) at 1.8 GHz ) the kernel time doesn't rise quite so much as on the other processor. Whether this means the AGP 6600 GT has issues with decoding this clip, I don't know. The 7600 GT seems to provide more offload with the drivers appearing to be doing significantly less work. On the AGP 6600 GT, kernel times rose to as much as 40-60% on the Athlon 64, whereas on the Sempron 'tis well below 20% with a single peak of 40.

Whether this is because the Sempron is more efficient I don't know. I wouldn't really expect the reduction in CPU utilisation to be that much greater on the Sempron ( I'm led to believe that the HD decode acceleration for H.264 and WMV HD is the same on all the 6600 GTs and the 7600 GTs, apart from the fact that pixel shader based inverse telecine for HD MPEG-2 is only available on the 7600 GT. Whether this is due to the 6600 GT being AGP instead of PCI-E, I don't really know, since I've never tried a PCI-E 6600 GT.)


You could try the trial of PowerDVD 7 (www.cyberlink.com). Cyberlink don't advertise that the ( new build as of last week ) trial of PowerDVD 7 supports nVidia's H.264 acceleration with much greater reduction in CPU utilisation than the older nVidia PowerDVD 6 build. I think this is due to a much more efficient codec and not just due to the hardware acceleration. You'll need to uninstall Showtime temporarily as its codecs will interfere with the PowerDVD ones. If it works with that, then the problem is with Showtime.

 

[sharangad]

Is it possible that it was featured on a older driver, then removed/toned down because of too many problems with most cards (like ActiveArmour on NF4) ?

Yes. It worked on the AGP 6600 GT with Forceware drivers between the beta 67.03 and official drivers after that upto 78.05 ( possibly some of the earlier 79.xx ). During this time the release notes for the drivers acknowledged the audio sync issue with high bitrate clips and slower CPUs and finally with forceware 80 they claimed it was fixed.

Here is a direct quote from the release notes for Forceware 81.84 they listed this under the issues resolved section:

"GeForce 6 Series/GeForce FX Series, AGP, Windows XP: Audio
problems occur playing WMV9 files using Windows Media Player
with the Microsoft patch for DirectX VA WMV9 acceleration.
The problem occurred only in VMR mode and not in overlay mode."

The problem is that they forced playback in overlay mode ( even when WMP10 was set to a VMR mode ) and there was no DXVA acceleration with KB888656 in overlay mode. Recently, with Forceware 90, the AGP 6600 GT with KB888656 plays WMV HD back in VMR mode ( this can clearly be seen by the colour reproduction in clips such as "Step into Liquid" 1080p WMV HD ) but there's no hardware acceleration.

 

[asicnewbie]

Well sharangad, it seems misery loves company...
After updating Nero Showtime from 3.0.0.1 to 3.0.1.3, H264 acceleration has stopped working. I cannot figure out what went wrong, and I've tried different drivers for my 6600GT PCIe. The last thing to do would be to 'rollback' to Showtime 3.0.0.1, but I can't figure out how to do that.

On top of that, HD-mpeg2 acceleration also seems to have stopped working. Curiously, DVD-video (720x480, 720x576) is still reported as 'accelerated.' (I never bought the Nvidia Purevideo decoder, if it makes a difference.)

 

[asicnewbie]

I tried a low-end Geforce 6100 motherboard (ECS C51GM-M) with PowerDVD 7 trial, and H264 acceleration works up to 720p. According to NVidia's Purevideo product table, the 6100 doesn't support H.264 acceleration at all. (Admittedly, NVidia seems to change/move the feature checkboxes on that page whimsically every few weeks!)

 

[sharangad]

nVidia have now updated their feature list. Once again they list WMV HD/VC-1 for AGP cards:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

"Note: Information in this table is based on ForceWare drivers v91.21 or higher"

I tried an AGP 7600 GS on a Sempron 2800 64 bit based system with Forceware 91.47 and there was no WMV HD decode acceleration with WMP11. I popped in an ATi Radeon X1600 Pro and it worked flawlessly with the same WMP11 settings.

Oh well.

 

[pcchen]

I have tried VC-1 acceleration with the previous beta driver (92.91) and current 93.71, both can do hardware accelerated decoding (I tested with GeForce 6600 and GeForce 7600GT). The older 91.xx does not support PureVideo HD so they can't accelerate VC-1 and WMV9 in HD resolution.

 

[sharangad]

I have tried VC-1 acceleration with the previous beta driver (92.91) and current 93.71, both can do hardware accelerated decoding (I tested with GeForce 6600 and GeForce 7600GT). The older 91.xx does not support PureVideo HD so they can't accelerate VC-1 and WMV9 in HD resolution.

Dude, is this AGP? The AGP 6600 GT and 7600 GS I had could do H.264 decoding but WMV HD didn't work even with the 91.47.

 

[pcchen]

That's weird. You may want to try the latest driver (93.71). However, it seems to be quite a "luck" thing to get PureVideo HD works with a AGP card. I have tried it on one computer which worked, and another one doesn't work at all, and I can't find the differences in the software/driver setups.