Enabling EVR in WinXP?

[AzJazz]

I had this working a few days ago, and now I can't seem to get it back (that's what I get for tweaking).

Does anyone know how I can re-enable EVR for WinXP / Sage RC 6.5.7?

Thanks ...

[Clift]

If you're trying to do it from the setup --> advanced setup menu it won't work. From what I have seen, EVR either shows up once or not at all in the renderer menu. What you should do is go into the sage.properties file and edit the following line:

videoframe/video_render_filter=EVR

[AzJazz]

OK, I've made some progress - After taking a number of steps, I was able to get the EVR option to show up again in SageTV.

Now, though, when I select EVR, I no longer have hardware acceleration. My SageTV CPU usage jumps to 50%, and the playback is jumpy.

This definitely not what I saw before when I enabled EVR.

Does anybody know what I may need to do next?

Thank again,

AzJazz

[Ryokurin]

EVR in XP has never had hardware acceleration. .net framework adds it, but the only way to get it hardware accelerated is to use Vista. Are you sure you are using the same codec as you were before? You may want to make sure you haven't inadvertently enabled post processing in properties, or in ffdshow if you are using directshow.

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by Ryokurin

EVR in XP has never had hardware acceleration. .net framework adds it, but the only way to get it hardware accelerated is to use Vista. Are you sure you are using the same codec as you were before? You may want to make sure you haven't inadvertently enabled post processing in properties, or in ffdshow if you are using directshow.

Hi, Ryokurin!

You (and others) have said that EVR doesn't have hardware acceleration in WinXP. I know that what you say is probably true, but I absolutely had some form of hardware acceleration working with EVR and WinXP SP2 a few days ago. I don't know if there is more hardware acceleration possible with EVR, but I was seeing the exact same processor loading for SageTV.exe under EVR that I saw using VMR9 (usually around 10%, and rarely up to 17% max). I am currently seeing VMR9 with loading still around 10%, but EVR shows approximately 50% for both the PureVideo and PowerDVD8 drivers.

The main reason I want to get EVR working again is that with EVR enabled, I was finally able to get HD content to play smoothly on my system. All my other SageTV tweaks for the last year or two didn't eliminate the micro-skips I have been dealing with (which keep me from watching much on my PC).

I still believe that I truly had hardware acceleration working at some level with EVR on WinXP and SageTV. I wonder ... could my installation of DirectX 10 for WinXP have helped with that?

[gplasky]

Even though you picked EVR in Sage the previous time it was probably "stuck" on VMR9 and gave you your hardware acceleration. Search the Internet. You will see EVR in XP will NOT support hardware acceleration and now that you have EVR truly working you are seeing this first hand. Upgrade to Vista and you'll get your hardware acceleration.

Gerry

[rcl]

After reading this thread, and getting jerky HD playback on SageTV client, I decided to do this on my Windows XP client machine:

- Install DirectX 10
- Upgrade to .NET 3.51
- Install "Total Media Extreme" from the HDPVR install disks so that I could get the H.264 playback codec which others say is quite streamlined
- Updated the client to 6.5.6 SageTV so that I could choose EVR.

After making these changes, my 4-5 year old AMD machine plays back HD content wonderfully from my remote SageTV server. I have an NVIDIA 8500GT in this machine. Some postings elsewhere have said that a client machine similar to mine is too slow and old, but after applying the changes above I'm a happy camper. I'm going to assume that the most critical change was the installation of the ArcSoft codecs for H.264 playback.

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Even though you picked EVR in Sage the previous time it was probably "stuck" on VMR9 and gave you your hardware acceleration. Search the Internet. You will see EVR in XP will NOT support hardware acceleration and now that you have EVR truly working you are seeing this first hand. Upgrade to Vista and you'll get your hardware acceleration.

Gerry

Hi, Gerry - I know we discussed this partially in another thread, but I did see performance changes between VMR9 and EVR in my PC's previous incarnation, where both VMR9 and EVR seemed to be working fine. Since EVR worked noticeably better than VMR9 (much smoother playback), I am inclined to believe that SageTV wasn't "stuck" in VMR9 - or, at least there was some configuration change and I probably had some part of EVR working at the time.

If I knew at the time that my putzing around trying to improve my playback was going to totally break my EVR capability, I wouldn't have done it. In our other thread we discussed that EVR in WinXP wasn't using hardware acceleration, and I saw a thread which described how to enable EVR hardware acceleration in WinXP for Cyberlink PowerDVD decoders. After I applied that "fix", EVR stopped working on my PC - which prompted the start of this thread.

(Insert unhappy sigh here)

I know that my PC certainly isn't a "stock" WinXP. I had "DirectX 10 for WinXP" (Microsoft said it was impossible, but it works) installed when this worked previously. I also recently tried "Alky for Applications 1.1 for WinXP" which allows some Vista-specific functionality in WinXP (though it didn't help with this EVR problem).

As far as Vista is concerned, I am fighting off the transition for as long as possible. I may pick up with Win7 when it becomes available (following the "Every other version of Windows works/sucks" philosophy). I don't know when I'll make the jump. I certainly can't see plunking down $180 dollars right now and lose connectivity to work (my company doesn't support Vista).

If all else fails, I'll go back to VMR9, and stop watching HD on my PC again. I could certainly do worse than that.

[Ryokurin]

Ok. I'm assuming that the DX10 for XP that everyone is getting is actually the Alky project, which was also known as Alky for applications. and actually was bunk as the programs that everyone was saying that worked in XP (solitare, Halo3, and a few others) that were DX10, were actually DX9 coded but paid attention to what version of the OS was installed. Most can be easily modified to run without Alky ever touching the system. In fact, the vast majority of Vista actually used DX9. Its a very popular belief that you can just install some software and make the difference, but seriously a large part of the difference between 9 and 10 was driver related, and Alky definitely didn't mess with that.

I had a 8500GT when I was runing XP, and I know it was a pain in the ass to get anything to display correctly out of it. It just wasn't really supported every well in the hardware acceleration part in XP (and really in Vista, while its better, it still isn't ideal) What I can tell you to try, no matter how it really is, is to disable inverse Telecine, and believe it or not turn up some of the 3d settings. You may think that AA, Anisotropic filtering and triple buffering won't affect video performance but it does at a minimum amount of performance. You should look there.

[sundansx]

Ryokurin,
When you say "turn up some of the 3d settings" such as AA, AF and 3buffer, do you mean turn up the quality or turn up the performance...ie..
AA = 0x, AF = off, 3buffer = off
OR
AA = 8X, AF = 16x, 3buffer = on

As for dx10 in XP with nVidia, I would have to agree with Ryokurin...from what I have read nVidia drivers only support hardware acceleration with EVR under DXVA2. XP drivers do not support DXVA2 and will never support it. This is backed up all of the experimentation I have done with multiple codecs and applications with 2 different nVidia 3d cards. I have heard some indication that ATI does support DXVA2 acceleration under XP, but I have not verified that as I do not have one of their cards.

Another thing to keep in mind with hardware acceleration, is that turning on subtitles on some applicaiton like zoomplayer (maybe sage) will also disable hardware acceleration if the graph is not built right. This is not user controllable.

[SHS]

have heard some indication that ATI does support DXVA2 acceleration under XP

This wrong as well as I have 3850 AGP it dosen't work under XP and recall rigth I think work under Windows 7 I think as I don't have Vista I couldn't test it sorry.

[Ryokurin]

Yes. I meant turn on 8x AA, turn up the AF and so forth. I had a problem with a 8300 mainboard that I recently upgraded to and just thought it was just the return of the problems I had with my 8500 which was microstuttering shaky pans and so forth. I only found the solution after I installed a 9600 in the system and noticed that video quality improved after turning some settings up there, and decided to try it on the 8300 video as well. You'll probably won't be able to max out everything on that 8500, but you'll likely get rid of much of the stuttering in the process.

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by Ryokurin

Yes. I meant turn on 8x AA, turn up the AF and so forth. I had a problem with a 8300 mainboard that I recently upgraded to and just thought it was just the return of the problems I had with my 8500 which was microstuttering shaky pans and so forth. I only found the solution after I installed a 9600 in the system and noticed that video quality improved after turning some settings up there, and decided to try it on the 8300 video as well. You'll probably won't be able to max out everything on that 8500, but you'll likely get rid of much of the stuttering in the process.

Now, that's interesting!

I have an 8800 GTS SLI setup. If I use the nVidia Control Panel to bump up my AA & AF settings, what application should I attach the customized settings to? I tried custom settings for "SageTV.exe" and "SageTVPlayer.exe", but I saw no changes in the video quality. I think I need to apply the custom settings to some other app.

On a side note, when I am trying to play a HD video (Live TV) in SageTV, I now see a separate "ActiveMovie" window open up that plays the video stream. The SageTV window is black while this occurs. If I click in the SageTV window, I can get the bottom controls to pop up, and I can hit the "stop" button to stop the video in the ActiveMovie window.

Does anybody know what is going on with this?