Need serious help with codecs (completely confused) (1 Viewer)

[velis]

OK, so I got tired of hoping for an OpenCL driver / codec and went ahead and bought a new mobo + CPU + ram.
Clean Windows 7 install, MP 1.1. beta as downloadable (no SVN builds), CCCP codec pack, Avivo decoder, Cyberlink PowerDVD decoder.
Also tried SAF codecs, but without much success so I reverted to the above listed.

The computer can play full HD with about 50% CPU usage, rare peaks to 60%, no dropped frames using ffdshow. Enabled filters are resize (lanzcos), sharpen, postprocessing. Even resized 720p video plays back no problem. Tested in MP and MPC-HC.

Live TV (SD 720x576 - 6-8Mbit streams) is another matter though:
Using Avivo decoder I get lots of stuttering, especially in fullscreen 1080p resolution. CPU usage 5 - 10%. Tried SidePort, UMA (512MB) and SidePort + UMA settings. All stutter and only UMA 512MB reduces the stuttering a bit, but still noticeable. Additionally, CCC keeps showing the deinterlacing filter moved to Bob instead of Vector Adaptive. Also pulldown detection and edge enhancement keep getting disabled.
Using Cyberlink decoder, the stuttering is almost gone windowed, but in full screen it's still very much there. Enabling / disabling HW acceleration does not help. 5%-10% CPU with HW accel, 10% - 20% without HW accel.
Using MS DTV-DVD decoder just pops the CPU to 50% and drops frames like hell. Removing the crap was really hard. No utilities / regedit hacks helped. In the end I managed to rename the file thus killing it.
All three codecs also feature crappy deinterlacing (Avivo does that after a channel change or two). I'm guessing Bob is the best method all of them can produce in the end.

I can't make ffdshow work (it's never actually used according to graph), probably because it's blocked in TsReader as a developer once told me. Naturally, I have enabled the appropriate codecs in the configuration.
Also, for liveTV, ffdshow Audio decoder doesn't get used. Instead a MPEG audio decoder is used (quartz.dll). I need ffdshow audio decoder because audio and video are not in sync (some 200ms) and I need to set a delay for audio streams.

Disks are more or less silent during playback and they are IMO definitely not the reason for stuttering.

Does anyone know what other filter I might try for live TV decoding (need MPEG2 and H264)?
I would prefer to have a filter that does nothing more than decode the stream to RAW (no deinterlacing either) and then I'd have ffdshow postprocess the resulting fields.
Is there a setting to unban ffdshow from TsReader so that I could test its performance?

Thanks,
Jure

MediaPortal Version: 1.1. beta
MediaPortal Skin: Blue3 wide
Windows Version: Win 7 Home Premium
CPU Type: Athlon II 250 3GHz
HDD: Seagate 120GB
Memory: 2GB DDR3 1600
Motherboard: Gigabyte Ga-MA790GPT-UD3H
Video Card: Integrated Radeon HD 3300
Video Card Driver: ATI Catalyst 9.11
Sound Card: Onboard Realtek ALC889A
Sound Card AC3: Optical SPDIF onboard
Sound Card Driver: Win7 default
1. TV Card: IPTV (no HW)
1. TV Card Type: IPTV
1. TV Card Driver: none
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:
MPEG2 Audio Codec:
h.264 Video Codec:
Satelite/CableTV Provider:
HTPC Case: Thermaltake DH-102
Cooling: a bunch of fans
Power Supply: LC Power LC-5500
Remote:
TV: Samsung LE37B650
TV - HTPC Connection: HDMI

 

[velis]

Discovered the problem

Turns out the culprit was the integrated POS HD 3300.
I put in a PCIEx HD 4350 and everything is great.
Sort of... Except for the gripe that I have to use a dedicated card when I specifically bought an integraded one to handle video. Turns out, it can't

I'd still like to have ffdshow though

 

[Vermi]

I can recommend Core AVC to decode h.264

 

[catavolt]

Try SAF (search the forum!)

 

[etheesdad]

+1 SAF

 

[kiwijunglist]

HD4350 is fairly under powered too. To get the benefits of the onboard HD3200 you need an HT3 capable CPU, i'm not sure if yours is HT2 or HT3. Since your using Win 7, make sure your using EVR in MP setup (advanced mode)

 

[velis]

Thanks for all the help guys, you're being very patient with me.

Side note: this is a live-TV only issue (.ts streams)

Having tested pretty much everything I can think of, I'm at a loss about what I should do.
Since the discrete HD 4350 showed a lot of improvement over the integrated POS HD 3300 I think I can now safely say that the integrated GPU is incapable of playing full screen video (either SD or HD).
But even with that, I still have the problem of those stupid Avivo deinterlacing settings reverting to bob, dropping pulldown detection, etc. This is plainly unacceptable.

I tried Avivo codec, Cyberlink codec, both with and without DXVA, they both suck, plainly said (stutter, artifacts / frame remnants, dropped frames).
MS DTV-DVD decoder is the worst of the bunch - the skipping / artefacting is just too much.
I can't believe a stupid ARM in my set top box is able to decode the same UDP multicast without problem while a 700MHz GPU can't.

I cant make ffdshow work. Tried just about any setting. In the end it just gets pulled into the graph, but no pins connected. Instead either Cyberlink or Avivo decoder is used.

What really frustrates me is that I can use ffdshow for video playback and it does everything without a problem with multiple postprocessing filters at work.

This is getting beyond ridiculous.
I need to get this TV working and I don't care how and for how much. My wife is killing me with her sarcasm by now

Is there a SW only codec out there that does a decent deinterlacing job, besides ffdshow? While at it, is there much programming to be done to remove the ffdshow ban from TsReader? I may as well also try that.

If there is no decent codec, what video card should I buy to fix these problems? It seems to me HD 4350 is too weak. Would a 4550 do the job, or do I have to go for 4670? What about NVidia? 220 GT?

I'm probably also trying Win XP tomorrow, but I'm not holding my fingers crossed for that...

 

[kiwijunglist]

are you having problems with h264 or mpeg2 live tv?

Arcsoft, pdvd8, pdvd9 all should work fine with live h264 tv + dxva.

I would reformat your computer, you probably have a mess of codecs installed.

Since your going with XP I would suggest
XP SP3
LATEST ATI THAT IS HOSTED BY YOUR VIDEO MANUFACTURER FOR YOUR CARD
TV CARD DRIVER
SOUND CARD DRIVER
DVBFIX
ANY OF THE OTHER MP REQUIREMENTS eg. WMP11 as listed in the wiki
reboot
MEDIAPORTAL 1.0.2 or 1.1 BETA (not latest svn as it has a tsreader bug)
UNLOCKED SAF CODEC PACK
reboot

Tune the channels in tvserver, DONT INSTALL OR CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE.
Check that TV codec = PDVD H264

Don't install anything else

BTW - the AVIVO codecs are not very good yet.

The good h264 hardware accelerated codecs are;
PDVD8
PDVD9
Arcsoft
MPC-HC (Doesn't work for TV)
CoreAVC (software, but now can incorporate some hardware acceleration (more so with CUDA enabled cards, ie. nvidia))

Can't commend much on MS H264 codec, seems to have a few problems with some ATI setups.

 

[velis]

Darn!!!!!
Seems I've been barking at the wrong tree.

I managed to find some SW MPEG-2 decoders (GPL-MPEG, dscaler) and also tried MPC-HC codec. Sidenote: can't believe how difficult it is to find this through google. Lots of garbage "hits" to filter before one useful turns up.
All of them work, all of them take <20% CPU for playing back my UDP streams (and neither has Yadif deinterlacer )

However, all of them also show significant artifacts.

So it occurred to me that TV server configuration also has an option to start timeshifting manually.
Doing this, i get ~6% CPU usage, but the resulting .ts file is also missing packets resulting in the same artifacts. Tried playing it with MPC-HC and VLC, both yielded the same results.

Of course, VLC plays the same UDP stream with no artifacts whatsoever.

So I guess both Beta 1 and SVN 24281 TV Servers tend to lose packets for whatever reason.
Tried to increase TV server priority, but with 6% CPU usage, I guess it wasn't to be expected that the packet losing would go away. And it didn't.

 

[hoborg]

This look like some general hardware faulire if you have "artefacts" even in software decoding mode.
...overheating CPU or GPU can cause them.