Cannot upgrade AMD drivers (1 Viewer)

[GreatMilenko]

Hello

I'm having the same problem that i have often seen in this forum, high def .mkv files won't play in Mediaportal either with black screen or garbled picture, depending upon whether i use SAF, PowerDVD or CoreAVC, and i know that the problem is probably due to old AMD drivers.
However even though it is a brand spanking new motherboard unfortunately it's from ASUS and their lateset driver is 8.660.0.0 and i cannot get the pc to run with the latest vga drivers from AMD's homepage, when i try it starts up in 16 color mode and 640*480 resolution and doesn't respond to anything i do.
So does anybody know howto get "Ati Catalyst 9.3+" drivers to work on an ASUS motherboard(ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO) or is there a better solution?

The .mkv files playback fine on MPC, but i would really like to use the integrated Mediaportal renderer.



MediaPortal Version: 1.0.2
MediaPortal Skin: wide
Windows Version: windows xp sp 3
CPU Type: AMD Sempron 1600mhz
HDD: Seagate 1.5gb
Memory: 2gb ddr3
Motherboard: ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO
Video Card: AMD 4200hd (onboard)
Video Card Driver: 8.660.0.0
Sound Card: onboard
Sound Card AC3: not used
Sound Card Driver: onboard
1. TV Card: FireDTV FloppyDTV C/CI
1. TV Card Type: DVB-C
1. TV Card Driver: 4.8.0
2. TV Card:
2. TV Card Type:
2. TV Card Driver:
3. TV Card:
3. TV Card Type:
3. TV Card Driver:
4. TV Card:
4. TV Card Type:
4. TV Card Driver:
MPEG2 Video Codec: MPV
MPEG2 Audio Codec: MPA
h.264 Video Codec: ffdshow
Satelite/CableTV Provider: TDC
HTPC Case: HFX Mini
Cooling: Heatpipes to Cabinet
Power Supply: HFX external 220 watt
Remote: IMon
TV: Panasonic v10
TV - HTPC Connection: HDMI

 

[hoborg]

GreatMilenko:

?
Did you installed "standard" drivers from ATI site?
Graphics Drivers & Software
Your OS -> Integrated/Motherboard -> Radeon HD 4200

 

[GreatMilenko]

Exactly i tried the latest version (10.2) from their website, and it resulted in windows xp starting up in 16 colors 640*480 screen mode with the driver marked as not working and CCC unable to start.
(Drivers & Support | GAME.AMD.COM)

So i reverted to the latest driver from ASUS.

 

[hoborg]

Exactly i tried the latest version (10.2) from their website, and it resulted in windows xp starting up in 16 colors 640*480 screen mode with the driver marked as not working and CCC unable to start.
(Drivers & Support | GAME.AMD.COM)

So i reverted to the latest driver from ASUS.

Try older 10.1.
10.2 failed to install on my ATI HD4770 too (XP/Win7)...

 

[GreatMilenko]

That worked i have upgraded to 10.1, although now i get this annoying error again on all video files:
Unable to play xxx

this is the log error:
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [ERROR][MPMain]: VideoPlayer9:exception while creating DShow graph Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {51B4ABF3-748F-4E3B-A276-C828330E926A} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 80040273. at MediaPortal.Player.VMR9Util.AddVMR9(IGraphBuilder graphBuilder)
at MediaPortal.Player.VideoPlayerVMR9.GetInterfaces()
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [ERROR][MPMain]: VideoPlayerVMR9: Exception while cleanuping DShow graph - Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at MediaPortal.Player.VideoPlayerVMR9.Cleanup()
2010-03-18 20:13:41.437500 [ERROR][MPMain]: PlaylistPlayer: *** unable to play - C:\Media\Movies\A.Good.Year.R5.LiNE.XviD.avi - skipping track!


2010-03-18 20:13:40.453125 [Info.][MPMain]: VideoPlayerVMR9: Enabling DX9 exclusive mode
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [Info.][MPMain]: VideoPlayer9:exception while creating DShow graph Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {51B4ABF3-748F-4E3B-A276-C828330E926A} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 80040273. at MediaPortal.Player.VMR9Util.AddVMR9(IGraphBuilder graphBuilder)
at MediaPortal.Player.VideoPlayerVMR9.GetInterfaces()
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [Info.][MPMain]: VideoPlayer9:cleanup DShow graph
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [Info.][MPMain]: VideoPlayerVMR9: Exception while cleanuping DShow graph - Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at MediaPortal.Player.VideoPlayerVMR9.Cleanup()
2010-03-18 20:13:40.546875 [Info.][MPMain]: VideoPlayerVMR9: Disabling DX9 exclusive mode


The weird thing is that if i install the old ASUS drivers again then MP wil playback all the video files EXCEPT highdef .mkv files which will be garbled again, i tried removing all codecs and installing 10.1 again which gave same result: All files return "Unable to play xxx" in MP, but works perfectly fine in all other mediaplayers??
This is a very strange bug that i never had before switching from Nvidia to AMD, is Mediaportal only tested on Nvidia cards?

 

[GreatMilenko]

Finally i managed to figure out some of the issues:
If you have an ASUS motherboard with onboard AMD 4200hd graphics then go with the drivers supplied on the ASUS site, i tried with ALL the old drivers from AMD's homepage and none of them works with DXVA, i only got a positive result in DXVA checker when i installed the ASUS drivers. Which is probably caused by the ASUS creating "their own" spinoff of the graphics chip in the mb, or more likely that they have just changed an id somewhere that fxxx the standard driver up.
The next problem is that i could only get DXVA playing when i use "VMR7" or "Overlay buffer" render in MPC application, the only reason i know that it is actually running is that cpu usage dropped to 10% on a movie that normally required 100% all the time. The codec (MPC from SAF 4) reports that there is no DXVA support, and the video decoder output isn't marked as having biCompression DXVA, but it works.
The only thing that remains after a very tiresome installation week is actually getting it to play in VMR9 render so that i can use it in Mediaportal or GB-PVR, when i try it now the video ouput is garbled or corrupt as i described earlier, so if anybody have experinced anything remotely like this please let me know.

To sum it up:
- AMD Drivers = no DXVA, no playback in MP but VMR9 works in all other players.
- ASUS Drivers = DXVA in VMR7(overlay), corrupt image in VMR9 in players.

both drivers work (AMD = no DXVA) in GraphEdit but i presume that is due to using VMR7 system default renderer.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Is there ANY Asus software running, that can completely screw things up.

Make sure BIOS video memory is at 512mb, also try EVR as renderer, that's in MPconfig.

You might also want to look at https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...playing-problems-rc1-tv-radio-avi-dxva-78501/

ps. the video's you are trying to play are normal xvid\divx and nothing HD.

 

[GreatMilenko]

>Make sure BIOS video memory is at 512mb, also try EVR as renderer, that's in MPconfig.
video mem is set to 512mb.
EVR works but without DXVA as im running xp.

> is there ANY Asus software running, that can completely screw things up.
Asus software reported an error when i ran with the standard drivers so i uninstalled it.

>You might also want to look at Playing problems in RC1: TV, radio, AVI, DXVA
I'm not running rc1, im running 1.0.2

> ps. the video's you are trying to play are normal xvid\divx and nothing HD.
It's the same result on normal(SD) xvid/divx movies as on h.264 .mkv movies, although the latter is the one where the cpu usage dropped from 100% to 10%.

I'm beginning to suspect that it might be because i haven't upgraded to latest version of Quartz.dll, i'm running windows xp sp3 so i didn't expect that i'd have to upgrade the system.

 

[Owlsroost]

Yes, running http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en to update DirectX would be a good idea.

Tony

 

[GreatMilenko]

No Directx was already updated using the directx_feb2010_redist.exe but for some reason directshow quartz.dll can only be updated through windows update, which is what i have done, and the main difference is that now the video decoder actually states that DXVA is supported and it is outputting it in the tha type (biCompression=dxva).
However the corrupt video image is still there in VMR9, so with all windows updates, latest ASUS drivers and latest directx, it is stil fxxx'ed up.
VMR7 still works, but it is using the Overlay buffer so maybe the problem is related to RGB conversion since displaying the content directly in overlay yuv(or something akin to that) format seems to work.