PureVideo confusion

[PhillJones]

I was under the impression that I had no choice but to use PureVideo decoder since I need hardware acceleration to decode HD and Purevideo is the only DVD decoder that can take use my graphics card to do the scaling and de-interlacing, thereby offloading the processor.

Now I'm reading stuff about PowerDVD 'taking advantage' of purevideo. Does this mean that PowerDVD is a viable alternative to purevideo as an MPEG decoder for people who rely on hardware acceleration and have nVIDIA cards?

[bialio]

That seems to be the rumor - although documentation to that fact is no where to be found on Cyberlink's web sight. They only mention that their latest software can "Leverage the power of your NVIDIA or ATI graphics card with support for hardware acceleration."

[PhillJones]

Does anybody have direct experience and can confirm that PowerDVD

a) Can use hardware acceleration of nVIDIA cards to offload the strain to the video card
b) Is much less of a buggy pile of poo than nVIDIA's purevideo. I'm thinking of the de-interlacing artifact and the fact that sometimes it craps out on a stream that other decoders handle just fine.

[soulprops77]

I can't really answer the question outright, but I'll say this. . .

I was suffering awful stuttering with my HD recordings while using PureVideo. Nothing I tried (and I tried just about everything) worked until I switched to the CyberLink decoder. Since then my HD has played back perfectly. . .

[mangriotis]

I will second soulprops77's comment... I was getting stutter on HDHR recordings, and switched to Cyberlink codec, everything is running great now.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

Does anybody have direct experience and can confirm that PowerDVD

a) Can use hardware acceleration of nVIDIA cards to offload the strain to the video card
b) Is much less of a buggy pile of poo than nVIDIA's purevideo. I'm thinking of the de-interlacing artifact and the fact that sometimes it craps out on a stream that other decoders handle just fine.

First off, this depends a bit on whether or not you are using Vista or XP. Purevideo and Purevideo HD are also different.

In XP, I believe the cyberlink decoders use the nvidia hardware acceleration, but not purevideo specifically. It does not need purevideo loaded on the system to work. Purevideo is available on XP as a speerate product, and takes the place of the cyberlink decoder.

In Vista, there is no purevideo decoder per se, though some have reported success in running the old purevideo codec under vista. Cyberlink in Vista absolutely uses the purevideo HD acceleration loaded in recent nvidia vista drivers, and does some more on top of it. It definitely uses the purevideo h.264 hardware decode in the 8XXX set of cards for BR and HD-DVD.

All that said, there are issues with Sage using the cyberlink decoders under Vista. Some report success, and others have demonstrable faults with some specific HD formats. Sage video support for HD in Vista is shaky right now and they need to do some things to fix it.

Hope this helps.

Thx
Mike

[PhillJones]

Well this is all in XP so that cuts out half of the confusion for a start.

I understand that PowerDVD is an entirely separate codec to purevideo and that the two are neither codependent or mutually exclusive but they basically perform precisely the same function: to decoder MPEG-2 files, transport streams and programme streams.

Now, having got that out of the way, it seems that the answer is that we all think that cyberlink PowerDVD takes advantage of the hardware acceleration for MPEG-2 decoding that is built into the nVIDIA cards. Which, IIUC comes in the form of the card performing the de-interlacing and scaling so that the CPU does not have to, thus enabling more moderately powered PCs to decode and scale HD material or run under VMR9. We don't actually know this because nobody here actually wrote it and people who write software are rarely so matter-of-fact in their advertising and instructions.

If that's where we stand then I think my best move is to download it and see if PowerDVD has a comparatively similar CPU burden to Purevideo. Perhaps by giving it something challenging to do while in windowed mode and watching the task manager.

Sound like a plan? If so then I'll do so as soon as I've got some spare money to buy it if it works out. Seeing as it's 50 bleeding dollars.

[bialio]

I downloaded the trial of PowerDVD7 today - installed on XP. There is an options in the settings that reads this:

"Enable hardware acceleration (nVidia PureVideo)"

The computer I loaded it on has a 7 series NVidia video card.

In SageTV, I don't see much difference between the Cyberlink decoder and the NVidia PureVideo (I have both installed). Both work very well with SD material, and both are a little jerky on HD content. I've got an ATI 2400 HD card being delivered today - I expect it will improve HD playback considerably. Hopefully the Cyberlink decoder will have a "Enable hardware acceleration (ATI Avivo)" option once I get it installed......

btl.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by bialio

I downloaded the trial of PowerDVD7 today - installed on XP. There is an options in the settings that reads this:

"Enable hardware acceleration (nVidia PureVideo)"

The computer I loaded it on has a 7 series NVidia video card.

In SageTV, I don't see much difference between the Cyberlink decoder and the NVidia PureVideo (I have both installed). Both work very well with SD material, and both are a little jerky on HD content. I've got an ATI 2400 HD card being delivered today - I expect it will improve HD playback considerably. Hopefully the Cyberlink decoder will have a "Enable hardware acceleration (ATI Avivo)" option once I get it installed......

btl.

Do you have VMR9 and FSE enabled? Both are needed in XP.

I believe that under Vista you get a lot more hardware assist, but then you have to deal with the Sage issues.

Thanks,
mike

[PhillJones]

You also need to set the codec of choice to default outside of sage and then set the sage decoder to default. There's a long running bug in Sage that means selecting Purevideo in sage will cause it to use anything but purevideo.

[fyodor]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I was under the impression that I had no choice but to use PureVideo decoder since I need hardware acceleration to decode HD and Purevideo is the only DVD decoder that can take use my graphics card to do the scaling and de-interlacing, thereby offloading the processor.

Now I'm reading stuff about PowerDVD 'taking advantage' of purevideo. Does this mean that PowerDVD is a viable alternative to purevideo as an MPEG decoder for people who rely on hardware acceleration and have nVIDIA cards?

I think that part of the confusion comes from marketing terms being used to cover different products.

Nvidia sells a software "purevideo" mpeg2 decoder (codec) that can take advantage of certain types of hardware acceleration on any directx compatible card having such functionality. When you hear people on this forum talking about purevideo it is usually in this context, since many people are dealing with playback of hd mpeg2 video content that they have recorded. The purevideo mpeg2 codec is reputed to work best with nvidia cards, but is not limited to them.

Nvidia's also refers to the ability of its video chipsets to accelerate certain types of video playback as "purevideo" or "purevideo hd" or "purevideo2". For most content, its products can only provide hardware acceleration of parts of the decoding process, however the new "purevideo2" cards can perform full end-to-end (bypassing the CPU) decoding of H.264 content such as blu-ray and hd-dvds.

PowerDVD is a playback program that includes several codecs, including ones for mpeg2 and h.264 content. These decoders should be available to other programs and can generally access directX hardware acceleration functions in supported video cards. Particularly, though, the PowerDVD H.264 decoder is currently the only one that can access the end-to-end hardware decoding of h.264 content. This is probably what you were hearing about.

[PhillJones]

I'm not confused about that. I understand that purevideo is both the marketing term for nVIDIAs hardware acceleration technologies and a name of a specific codec. I'm sorry I used the term in both senses in my original post. This isn't the question.

The question is whether there are any MPEG-2 codecs available that can take advantage of nVIDIAs hardware acceleration in the way that the purevideo codec can but something like the sage MPEG-2 codec or the Elecard codec cannot.

I don't care about H.264 at the minute.

[fyodor]

Gotcha. I think that most directx decoders can utilize hardware acceleration, though I understand that the "Default" sage decoder cannot. FWIW, I get the best performance results from the cyberlink mpeg2 decoder.

[toricred]

Now you've got me thinking again about the Cyberlink drivers. Can you just get the HD264 Pack and get all the codecs you need from PowerDVD or do you have to buy the full PowerDVD Max or Deluxe?

[PhillJones]

Actually, a little hunting on the Cyberlink site reveals that you can buy either the DVD decoder alone or the 264 pack for $20 and $40 respectively. That's a much more attractive offer.

http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/cyber...er_77_ENU.html

With only a 6600GT and WindowsXP, would I get any benefit from Cyberlink's H264 decoder seeing as I can't get hardware acceleration for HD video? I'm thinking that HD video in anything other that MPEG-2 is a no go for me.

[Eckwell]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

Actually, a little hunting on the Cyberlink site reveals that you can buy either the DVD decoder alone or the 264 pack for $20 and $40 respectively. That's a much more attractive offer.

http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/cyber...er_77_ENU.html

With only a 6600GT and WindowsXP, would I get any benefit from Cyberlink's H264 decoder seeing as I can't get hardware acceleration for HD video? I'm thinking that HD video in anything other that MPEG-2 is a no go for me.

do you need to by it? or will the one in the trial work? at least to test?

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by Eckwell

do you need to by it? or will the one in the trial work? at least to test?

Sure if I decide to try it out, I'll install the trial version and not pay for it for two weeks hopping that I'll be able to find any deal breaking problems but I like to be fairly confident of something before I install the trial for two reasons.

1) a Yoda would say "Installaing software leads to tweaking, tweaking leads to instability, instability leads to paaaiiin"
2) Two weeks is rarely long enough to discover that one situation that your new software doesn't handle and then it's too late to ask for your money back.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

You also need to set the codec of choice to default outside of sage and then set the sage decoder to default. There's a long running bug in Sage that means selecting Purevideo in sage will cause it to use anything but purevideo.

I'm not familiar with this one. Can you please explain?

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by Djc208

I'm not familiar with this one. Can you please explain?

You have to make sure that nVIDIA is the 'default' codec on your system form MPEG-2. To check this, you can play an MPEG file in WMP and see if the little icon pops up in the system tray. If it doesn't then you can install a filter maganer like radlight filter manager and change the merit of the one that is being used to not prefered and change the merit of the nVIDIA codec to prefered. Then you have to reboot and make sure that WMP is now using the nVIDIA codec.

Then go into advanced settings and change the choice of video codec to default and everything works fine. If you have another codec as default and set the codec to nVIDIA manually, it's hit and miss which decoder it'll use. Some people say ti merely locks up the nVIDIA decoder control panel but that's not what happens on my system.

[Keenan]

I notice in Radlight, as shown in the pic below, there's different settings such as Normal, Normal+1, Preferred, Preferred+1, Preferred+255. What's the difference in those settings, and is it just Nvidia Video Decoder that needs to be set as the preferred? I loaded the TiVo Desktop app the other day and it messed with my decoder settings. I think I finally got if back right, but I'm still not seeing any tray icon.