Hardware acceleration confusion

[Soob]

I'm looking to put together a new dedicated new HTPC but I am quite confused on hardware acceleration, especially as it relates to media portal. I have been reading on this for a week and I'm more confused that ever so I hope some of you can answer some of the questions I have so I can decide on hardware to buy.

I am trying to decide between an integrated video chipset ie. AMD 780G, Nvidia 8200 or Intel G45 system, or getting a card like an Nvidia 8500 or ATI 2600XT, or just ignoring hardware acceleration and getting a grunty CPU.

Q1. Hardware Acceleration (HA) is apparently available in the above chipsets for MPEG2 and h264 and GF8500/2600XT but will Mediaportal use it for TV/DVD/video? ie. I thought HA would be totally codec controlled, but I now have my doubts and seems very software related.

Q2. Why do people often refer to PowerDVD settings with regard to HA when they are using Mediaportal? Is there something about the Cyberlink codec that can only be enabled via PowerDVD?

Q3. Is the picture quality from HA better than software decoders?

Q4. I like what FFDshow does for upscaling of DVDs, but it seems to tax the CPU a fair bit, so can the HA solutions do the same thing?

Q4. Do people have recommendations/opinions regarding HA?

[Pascal]

Originally Posted by Soob

I'm looking to put together a new dedicated new HTPC but I am quite confused on hardware acceleration, especially as it relates to media portal. I have been reading on this for a week and I'm more confused that ever so I hope some of you can answer some of the questions I have so I can decide on hardware to buy.

I am trying to decide between an integrated video chipset ie. AMD 780G, Nvidia 8200 or Intel G45 system, or getting a card like an Nvidia 8500 or ATI 2600XT, or just ignoring hardware acceleration and getting a grunty CPU.

Q1. Hardware Acceleration (HA) is apparently available in the above chipsets for MPEG2 and h264 and GF8500/2600XT but will Mediaportal use it for TV/DVD/video? ie. I thought HA would be totally codec controlled, but I now have my doubts and seems very software related.

The codec has to enable the hardware acceleration. Often this can be selected in the configuration of the specific codec.

Q2. Why do people often refer to PowerDVD settings with regard to HA when they are using Mediaportal? Is there something about the Cyberlink codec that can only be enabled via PowerDVD?

PowerDVD is (at least) capable of enabling the PureVideo (HWAC) of nvidia cards, but again this has to be enabled in the settings of the codec (accessible from within mediaportal configuration screen).

Q3. Is the picture quality from HA better than software decoders?

Didn't see quality differences, but for sure it results in not dropping frames, sometimes a software decoder will drop some frames, if the cpu is busy with something else.

Q4. I like what FFDshow does for upscaling of DVDs, but it seems to tax the CPU a fair bit, so can the HA solutions do the same thing?

Don't know

Q4. Do people have recommendations/opinions regarding HA?
I would choose a graphics card with HW acceleration, you could always choose to disable the HW (do not know why). And the HW AC graphics cards are not expensive.

greetz,

Pascal

[freakaz0id]

I am also having problems with the HA of my MSI 8500GT on XP.

I tried some codecs (cyberlink 7/8), played around with the config but I can't seem to activate the hardware acceleration?! CPU usage for h264 encoded videos is still at least 50% (with a athlonx2 4850e), I get better performance with CoreAVC, so that can't be the glorious HA...

How can I check if HA is active? Any drivers my system's maybe missing? Got nvidia's geforce drivers version 175.19...

Any clues what I might have done wrong? Thx

[damaster]

Originally Posted by freakaz0id

I am also having problems with the HA of my MSI 8500GT on XP.

I tried some codecs (cyberlink 7/8), played around with the config but I can't seem to activate the hardware acceleration?! CPU usage for h264 encoded videos is still at least 50% (with a athlonx2 4850e), I get better performance with CoreAVC, so that can't be the glorious HA...

How can I check if HA is active? Any drivers my system's maybe missing? Got nvidia's geforce drivers version 175.19...

Any clues what I might have done wrong? Thx

See my post here for more detailed information on getting HA working in MP: A decoder for the new track could not be found. track type: SRT/UTF8

[jameson_uk]

First off some explanation:

Hardware acceleration occurs when you have hardware that supports it. You have a video codec which knows how to get your card to do the harware acceleration and most importanly you need software that uses the right codecs. Some players do not let you chose the codec (in order to hide the complexity from you but this might mean you loose the hardware decoding)

This is the theory.... In practice there are a few things that can screw this.

• Post Processing. Any form of post-processing will stop hardware acceleration working. So no upscaling and HA. (this also goes for some subtitles)
• Badly Encoded Video. If you have downloaded stuff from the net (naughty naughty) then there is a good chance it is badly encoded and does not match the standards for H264. This means the hardware acceleration does not like it. This is obviously not a problem with legit BD discs.

Also I seem to recall that some cards will only do HA when the renderer is set to VMR9.

Finally MPEG2 acceleration is largely a moot point now. It does not take much CPU to decode so it not really an issue.

Originally Posted by Soob

Q1. Hardware Acceleration (HA) is apparently available in the above chipsets for MPEG2 and h264 and GF8500/2600XT but will Mediaportal use it for TV/DVD/video? ie. I thought HA would be totally codec controlled, but I now have my doubts and seems very software related.

There are a few cases where hardware acceleration wont work but basically if you set the right codecs in MediaPortal (you can set them for each module and chose MPEG2 and H264 codecs) then it will work. If you are still getting high CPU usage then it is likely that MP is unable to use the filters you have asked for. Locate GraphEdit and try and connect to the graph whilst you are playing a video and this will tell you which filters are actually being used.

Q2. Why do people often refer to PowerDVD settings with regard to HA when they are using Mediaportal? Is there something about the Cyberlink codec that can only be enabled via PowerDVD?

The codecs that come with PowerDVD do a decent job of decoding H264 with hardware acceleration (not many do) and this tends to be bundled with BD drives so people have it around. Arcsoft TMT is another solution people will talk about. A lot of other programs which do H264 decoding either do not support hardware acceleration or do not expose their codecs for you to use.

Q3. Is the picture quality from HA better than software decoders?

Should make no difference at all. There is some marketing crap around talking about how PureVideo (Nvidia) and AVIVO (ATI) improves PQ but I have seen little evidence of this.

Q4. I like what FFDshow does for upscaling of DVDs, but it seems to tax the CPU a fair bit, so can the HA solutions do the same thing?

Not really. As above you can not do post processing and get hardware acceleration at the minute. If you can get PureVideo or AVIVO to do anything close to what you can do with FFDShow then I would be interested...

Q4. Do people have recommendations/opinions regarding HA?

Very worth it. 1080p H264 material would not run on some low-powered machines without hardware acceleration but the savings you get in terms of power usage (and therefore heat and noise) make it a really good idea. I know the 780G boards do quite well but I have no experience of the others. The AMD boards also can take the low powered chips (45W) which means you can get a really low-powered machine and still do 1080p playback. Think of what you could do with all the money you save on electricity

[een_mq]

my 2 cents:

In real life, as mentioned by other posters above, getting HA to work is very hard:
- only works for properly encoded movies
- no upscaling, so you have to go into MP and change the codec everytime to switch back and forward between HA for BD movies, and say upscaling using ffdshow or other divx movies

So in reality, if you get a grunty enough CPU any say C2d at least 1.83 GHz or AMD at least 2GHz, you should not have any problem with h264 movies, BD, upscaling DIVX sharpen etc.

And you don't have to care abou HA and subtitles not working...
I got a C2D 1.83 GHz and can play 720p h264 mkvs without any problem. and a 2.4GHz one will make sure that everything will work well.
So no headaches, and you get the same PQ and better if you watch lower bitrate movies

Just my 2 cents, as I've been through this road before.

[Soob]

Thank you for the replies. It's clear to me now what I want is not provided by HA (een_mq summed it up well).

I want upscaling with some sharpening and noise reduction, it's a big improvement with my 46" screen, and therefore HA is irrelevent to me since if I have a CPU capable of that then it should do Bluray. If it doesn't a cheap $20 HA card can be added to the system to provide that

If anyone is interested I decided on a Intel E5200 (2.5GHz C2D). I don't feel the G45 mobos are mature with many people experiencing total failures on the Intel ones, and atm the price is more than a non IGD+HA video card anyway. I could have gone the AMD path but the fact the E5200 is a great overclocker swayed me should I want more grunt.

For anyone else reading this thread trying to work out what to buy for a HTPC regarding HA, I would summarise my research in this way;

1 - DTV has a lot of old poor video quality material that benefits a lot from on-the-fly post processing
2 - ffdshow can be setup to easily toggle various post processing filters on and off, but it does not work with HA
3 - Nvidia's PureVideo gen2/3 can do noise reduction (NR) and sharpening, but imo their NR blurs far too much
4 - No HA video card does upscaling which is excellent for DVDs and SD DTV see this or this.
5 - I need to be able to compress DTV recordings (a football game in HD is up to 25GB), and the best codec is H264 which requires a fair bit of CPU power to get the job done in a reasonable time. (tip see this for easily automated recompressing and commercial skipping.
6 - a cheap AU$20 ATI 2400pro or Nvidia 8400GS can do bluray HA decoding easily.

Thanks again to everyone for their input, in this thread and many others.

[Sheytan]

The best HA codec is MPCVideoDec the codec activates DXVA for x264 and VC-1 (VC-1 DXVA only works on ATI cards) and also play x264 that isn't compatible with DXVA (not encoded with Level 4.1) perfectly, while PowerDVD HA only works for x264 and also can't play x264 encoded movies that isn't compatible with x264

[globaldonkey]

I run a 3.0GhZ core2duo with the Intel G35 chipset, and can play a 1080p H.264 MKV with CPU maxing out at about 30%. A 1080p WMV pushes it a little less at 25%. I'm using CoreAVC for h.264.

As pointed out, if you are running a lower power CPU, you'll need HA to play high def h.264 content.

[damaster]

Originally Posted by globaldonkey

I run a 3.0GhZ core2duo with the Intel G35 chipset, and can play a 1080p H.264 MKV with CPU maxing out at about 30%. A 1080p WMV pushes it a little less at 25%. I'm using CoreAVC for h.264.

As pointed out, if you are running a lower power CPU, you'll need HA to play high def h.264 content.

I have to disagree with you entirely. I run a 3.2 GHz dual core Athlon X2 and can easily play 1080p H.264 MKVs using CoreAVC, ffdshow, and other software decoders. My CPU runs at about 25-30% with CoreAVC and my GPU is severely under-utilized (ATI Radeon HD 3470).

But why run my CPU at a constant 30%, raising power usage and heat levels if I have a GPU that is meant for the job? Hardware acceleration not only takes the load off your CPU, thus reducing power consumption and heat dissipation, but reduces the risk of dropped frames and even often even results in smoother playback and better overall picture quality.

If you have a GPU that can handle hardware acceleration, then don't let it go to waste. Make good use of it and let it do what it was meant to do. Otherwise, it's a wasted piece of electronic circuitry in your HTPC.

If you don't have a GPU that can handle it, then by all means off load the work to your CPU.