[OTHER] Broadcom Hardware Decoder BCM970012 - PCIe Mini Card (1 Viewer)

[techchad]

I'm just curious as if this add-in card would work with MediaPortal, I'm seriously considering getting this card for smoother HD playback from what I've heard about the card so far it's is awesome. I just want to make sure I will be able to utilize it in my MediaPortal box. I know XBMC has full support for this in it's latest release, so I'm hopeful that it will be the same news for MP.

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Thanks for any insight!

 

[tourettes]

If it accelerates video playback thru DXVA then it will work with MP, otherwise no.

 

[funkstar]

Someone can correct me if I'm way off the mark, but as this accelerates the DirectShow component, anything that uses that should benefit from this card. I don't think you need specific support for it. If anything does need specific support it will be down to the codec on your system that is actually doing the video decoding.

As PowerDVD and TMT are mensioned, at the very least BluRay playback will be supported via one of these and the appropriate player plugin for MP.

 

[Kotik]

Someone can correct me if I'm way off the mark, but as this accelerates the DirectShow component, anything that uses that should benefit from this card. I don't think you need specific support for it. If anything does need specific support it will be down to the codec on your system that is actually doing the video decoding.

As PowerDVD and TMT are mensioned, at the very least BluRay playback will be supported via one of these and the appropriate player plugin for MP.

As i get it, during drivers installation it will add a Broadcom Video Decoder (DS Filter) and then you simply have to select those codecs for HD decoding under any DS based player.

What i am worried about are the splitters. Since not all Video Decoders are able to connect to all the container splitters. In our case TSReader.

I ordered this card myself just to try it out since deinterlacing quality of my ION is poor at best. Will report back as soon as i can conduct my tests with this piece of hardware.

P.S. MPC-HC project recently added support for the card, my guess is they did it by modifying the MpegSplitter.ax to output a video pin that is supported by the Broadcom Video Decoder.

 

[Kotik]

Received the card yesterday and conducted some tests.

It works the way i mentioned in the post above. During installation it will register a DS filter called "Broadcom Video Decoder" and all you have to do is to use this filter under any DS player. The hardware itself supports H.264p/i, VC-1p/i and MPEG & MPEG2.

So i tried almost all of the formats that are supported and they do work. Latest drivers do have a small glitch on 23.976 content since while the source material is 23.976 the codec will try to output 23.971 which will result to some occasional stutter. Now this can be easily solved by using an older driver release which will output 23.976.

Most important is that it does support interlaced VC-1.

Pros-->

1. You don't need any other HD codecs installed on your system, you just install it and all the HD material will work (be advised that it will not work with video files that are not encoded with DXVA standards. So High Profile 5.1 with 16 ref. frames won't work).

2. Low power consumption.

3. Easy to setup.

4. Can be used with any DS based player.

5. Post-processing can be performed! Yes that's right you can finally use any kind of post-processing.

6. Price.

Cons-->

1. Lack of advanced HD deinterlacing. Although this one can be solved by just forcing the card to output interlaced so that the GPU can do the deinterlacing.

2. Occasional stutter. I am using MPC-HC to conduct my tests and i did notice stutter almost with all the material. Same material works smooth under my ION DXVA setup. The reasons for this might be countless, drivers, splitter, source file etc. BUT important thing is that it is not as smooth as i would like it to be. Don't get me wrong, most people won't notice any of this stutter, but for those that want to have a perfect stat. output graph in MPC-HC under the correct output HZ will be a bit disappointed.

3. Availability in Europe.

Something worth to mention is that i was unable to use the Broadcom codec successfully under MP since by default the codec has deinterlacing ON and i have to turn it off and while i can do it over MPC-HC and Graph Studio and get each time the right instance of the codec, under MP i have no access to the codec page configuration and this will result in MP using always the codec with it's default settings.

 

[claimui]

I purchased the updated BCM970015 from LogicSupply. I am using it in a Thinkpad with integrated x3100 graphics and Windows XP SP3. It took some experimentation but I finally have it working (mostly) well in MediaPortal.

On certain videos (particularly 1080p h.264 files), using the VMR9 renderer would result in no video (black screen) while audio played normally. Switching to EVR (again, this is under Windows XP) would result in MediaPortal's built-in player not even starting correctly. I could hear the audio in the background (sometimes), but the screen would stay frozen on the file list.

After several tests with GraphStudio, I noticed that MediaPortal was using the Broadcom Video Decoder filter, but it was connecting the graph differently than other media players. I had set my MediaPortal Configuration to use default DirectShow settings. So I unclicked the box and specified "Broadcom Video Decoder" as my decoder for H.264, etc.

Now it seems to work with all videos, but only using the EVR (software) renderer. I still get inconsistent results with the VMR9 renderer, but that is probably not a MediaPortal problem because I'm now seeing it with other media players when set to VMR9.