Codecs State of HW acceleration (1 Viewer)

[drealit]

I think it's disgraceful that encoders can't follow a few SIMPLE TO FOLLOW RULES in regards to ensuring their encodes are DXVA compliant. It's not that hard to do... and the settings that affect it aren't even significant enough to bother with changing in the first place. If an encoder can't take the time to do that and ensure the quality of their encode then they don't deserve to be in my collection. It isn't ATI/Nvidia's fault... it's the craptastic scene encodes that get released online where they only care about getting their copy out first rather than the quality of the encode let alone efficiency and compatibility. I'm an internal encoder for a certain site and have no trouble ensuring DXVA compliance with my encodes, I expect the same from others.

If you're having trouble with a certain file being hardware accelerated... just get rid of it. The team/individual who worked on it isn't worth your time.

 

[tourettes]

If you're having trouble with a certain file being hardware accelerated... just get rid of it. The team/individual who worked on it isn't worth your time.

Or just buy the blu-ray and use that. They are following the specs

 

[velis]

drealit: Those are my encodes. It took me a month of trying out various x264 parameters so that my camera encodes look their best. I have no idea which parameters mess up the encode since the documentation isn't exactly full of "Watch out, this one screws up DXVA" warnings.

tourettes: Just today I was buying some 10 blu ray movies. One of them was the latest transformers (preorder, but I have time). Now, I would gladly listen to your advice, but that particular movie comes on three (3) discs and it's not the only one with such ridiculous amount of data. That's either 3x50 or 3x25GB. Although I have 3x1.5TB disks in my HTPC, I don't think they would last very long with that kind of space requirements. And I'm sure not watching the movies through discs. They would just scratch and fail sooner rather than later. Plus I'm no fan of swapping discs in the middle of an action scene. It just ruins the experience for me. I will definitely transcode those movies as well. I believe 10-15GB x264 2pass transcode yields a good enough quality for me (note that I'm only getting a full HD TV next month so I may need to up the bitrate a bit) while also ensuring a more than necessary backup copy of a particular movie. With current prices I have no intention of re-purchasing them.
(I hope I didn't just say something incriminating - I believe it's within my rights to make a backup copy of a movie, please correct me if I'm wrong)

I'm still waiting for OpenCL to fix the situation a bit. In the mean time (less than a year, hopefully) I'm just going to have to bear with a skipped frame or two. It feels a waste that I would now buy a new MB+CPU+RAM just to fix this when the old setup can still cope with good outlook for situation improvement in the near future.

 

[moab]

@drealit: (I hope I didn't just say something incriminating - I believe it's within my rights to make a backup copy of a movie, please correct me if I'm wrong)

No one has ever been prosecuted (yet?!) for a personal backup of licensed material. Interpretations of the copyright license say that you are licensed to hold the content as opposed the physical media.
All prosecutions to date have been for distributing content. None have been for downloading/purchasing/receiving/backup copies.
IMHO DVDs and CDs are the biggest rip off as they are easily damaged. Remember the floppy disks - they had a square plastic protective sleeve protecting the circular magnetic media.

[Caveat: this does not constitute legal advice on copyright. Please consult a legal professional for copyright issues.]

 

[tourettes]

IMHO DVDs and CDs are the biggest rip off as they are easily damaged. Remember the floppy disks - they had a square plastic protective sleeve protecting the circular magnetic media.

And do you remember how quickly floppys did get damaged? Few months in closet and the floppy could have lost the data...

 

[drealit]

Haha yes it's very true... I don't trust disc media anymore whatsoever. I'm actually in the process of redoing a lot of my encodes. Not because they weren't DXVA compliant, but because I felt I could do a better job . For all you DIYer's... here's some guidelines to ensure DXVA compliancy etc.:

Normal 1080p movie (these were taken from a private site but are great all around guidelines for DXVA and quality assurance)
cabac= (different from 1 = not good enough)
ref= 4 (max. resolution = 1920x1088) < 3 ref = not good enough
ref= 5 (max. resolution = 1920x864) < 3 ref = not good
ref= 6 (max. resolution = 1920x720) < 3 ref = not good enough
vbv_maxrate= (higher than 50000 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
vbv_bufsize= (higher than 50000 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
analyse= (different from 0x3:0x113 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
rc= (should be 'crf' or '2-pass', anything else is not good enough)
me_range= (lower than 16 = not good enough)
trellis= or deadzone= (Use either trellis = 1 or 2, or deadzone figures lower than 10, otherwise = not good enough)
bframes= (lower than 3 = not good enough)
deblock= (should be between -3,-3 and -1,-1 anything else is discouraged)
me= (dia = not good enough, hex = discouraged)
subme= (1-5 = not good enoughD, 6 = discouraged)

I do all my encodes in CRF format to ensure a certain level of constant quality throughout the film. If you're using one of those programs that does it all for you... I highly encourage you to learn the trade (not so far as to say use just command line lol) but at least use eac3to, megui and mkvmerge on their own so you have full control of your encoding.

Recent Example:
encode

source


I took the original video stream from 21GB down to 12GB while keeping it transparent to the source. I think it was a 20 hour encode on a phenom 940.

 

[winterescape]

... I tested a lot of movies and I couldn't see anyone showing problems with DXVA aceleration... So, I'm using DXVA by now. With my GF8200 onboad it's doing aways fine, I don't know about what happens with some ATI GPUs and this problems we read about.

I'd like to make some tests with Cuda to make possible using FFDShow postprocessing settings to improve image quallity, but it's not easy... I just couldn't get Cuda and FFDShow postprocessing working simultaneously, even when I know it's, in theory, possible.

what version Nvidia drivers are you running?

 

[Ticiano]

The last released drivers... and SAF.

 

[velis]

Haha yes it's very true... I don't trust disc media anymore whatsoever. I'm actually in the process of redoing a lot of my encodes. Not because they weren't DXVA compliant, but because I felt I could do a better job . For all you DIYer's... here's some guidelines to ensure DXVA compliancy etc.:

Normal 1080p movie (these were taken from a private site but are great all around guidelines for DXVA and quality assurance)
ref= 4 (max. resolution = 1920x1088) < 3 ref = not good enough
ref= 5 (max. resolution = 1920x864) < 3 ref = not good
ref= 6 (max. resolution = 1920x720) < 3 ref = not good enough
vbv_maxrate= (higher than 50000 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
vbv_bufsize= (higher than 50000 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
analyse= (different from 0x3:0x113 = not good enough, important for DXVA compliancy)
me= (dia = not good enough, hex = discouraged)
subme= (1-5 = not good enoughD, 6 = discouraged)

Yes, floppies sure were miserable. IoMega ZIP was much more trustworthy. When I last plugged it in (i had a paralel port version), it still read the discs after 5 years of laying in the closet

Anyway, to the encoding parameters. Thanks for listing some
Why do you list resolution constraints for ref? I'm using 6 for all my encodes regardless of res. My poor E8400 can't cope with more and I don't want to waste quality to impatience. So I settled for 6 and left it at that. Is it important for DXVA?

Hm, I do not limit maxrate and bufsize in my encodes. Instead I let x264 decide what's best. But why would I limit maxrate and bufsize? Do DXVA cards have issues with decoding bitrates too high?

analyze: Hm, I'm using x264 through mencoder and I have this: partitions=all:8x8dct. I'm not sure how that's different from the bitmask you stated since I couldn't find an explanation for it (in a rather haste search that is).

For me parameter, i'm using umh (uneven multi-hexagon).
subme is always at 9.
I always use High profile with level 40.

Looking at this, I'm tempted to say that the culprit would be analyze / partitions parameter.
Can you confirm? I'd like to know how I must set this parameter so that it works. Can you list the partitions that the bitmask represents?

Thanks,
Jure

 

[Frantid]

Sorry for this stupid question, but does anyone know for sure what the current state of HW video playback acceleration is?

The thing is, I have an 8800GTS + HD4350 at home and I have yet to see any CPU usage drop from playing various media.
Of course, i only care about H264 since all other codecs are easy enough on the CPU for it to be able to handle them no problem. Usually low resolution helps too.

I've tried pretty much every codec out there (CoreAVC, Cyberlink, Avivo, PureVideo), but none of them gave me any good results (read: HW acceleration).
Either they wouldn't play the media at all or they simply didn't use HW for acceleration. Well, even if they did, CPU utilization was just about the same as with ffdshow.

I've got a ATI HD4550 and it does HW accel. I had to roll back to 9.4 drivers though to get it consistent. The newer ones all gave me issues. I also have TMT3 to do the blueray & HD disks, hooked up to MP by way of the arcsoft HD plugin -- does HD & Blueray HW acceleration just fine. My Sony TG3E does h264 and I use Pdvd 8 version 2021.50 codecs. I purchased Pdvd before they removed the HD limits - so I never update it to the latest version.