DXVA (hardware accel) not working for h264 on ATI HD2600PRO

[pingmustard]

Hi all, I recently jumped on the SageTV bandwagon a month or so ago. I've been trying to get H264 playback with no success for the past few days. To clarify my situation:

1. I installed PowerDVD 8.0. I uninstalled nVidia PureVideo.
2. I verified that DXVA does work. Play back is fine outside Sage with:
a. GraphEdit (just swapping the default ffdshow with Cyberlink H.264/AVC Decoder (PDVD8) -- see attachment for full screenshot.
b. Also tried Media Player Classic and barebone external filters and that worked fine as well. However, I do notice that I had to set it to use VMR7/9 in windowed mode to get Hardware acceleration.
3. I'm running Windows XP on a P4 and a ATI HD2600Pro 512MB agp video card. I'm using SageTV 6.4.8 media center edition (no clients or place shifters).

So at this point I know I can get DXVA working outside cause my CPU drops from 100% to 10-20%. However, I'm not seeing it happen inside SageTV. Can someone offer some advice? I've already tried setting it to use the direct show filter and modified the properties file to use the cyberlink h264 filter, but no go. Does anyone know how I can figure out what codec is actually in use when a video is played?

Also, I was using pureVideo 1.02 to handle mpeg2 before, but I had to use Overlay mode to avoid lags. Changing to VMR9 didn't fix it. With my tests outside Sage, I was running in VMR mode. Has anyone come across this problem or have a solution? Using VMR9 mode inside Sage didn't help either.

I also included log file of sageTV client as well in case that helps.

Thanks in advance for your input!

[joematt]

Try changing "always_use_dshow_player=false" to "true" in your properties file. Make sure that Sage isn't running when you make your change!

[pingmustard]

I just tried making the changes you suggested.. Still no luck.

1. Is there a way to see what codec sage is trying to use? Possibly a setting to turn on logging? I didn't any such "log" properties in the sageclient.properties file.

I should also note I tried both Overlay and VMR9 with no success. My deinterlacing option has been disabled as well.

Any other advice/suggestions?

[gplasky]

In your sageclient.properties files:

videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=Cyberlink H.264/AVC

is not correct.

videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=CyberLink H.264/AVC Decoder (PDVD8)

IS correct.

Shut down sage and change it.
Make sure you go into the PowerDVD player and check "Use Hardware acceration" in the Video options.

Gerry

[pingmustard]

I don't know which combination of the 2 did the trick, but I did both and it's using hardware acceleration now !

So now I have a new problem. I believe the cyberlink codecs might not be as robust as I'd hope for.

When playing back some sample h264 movie trailer content I downloaded off the web, everything plays flawlessly inside and outside sage tv with the cyberlink codecs. However, dish content still lags. I know DXVA is working because it at least plays with annoying jerks every 5-10 seconds (whereas w/o DXVA it would crawl every second). My CPU level runs around 50%. When I try the same codecs under graphEdit, the same problem arises for the same h264 content from dish. If I play the same content on my other QuadCore machine using Nero showtime, then everything works fine.

So, next question... is there an alternative codec that people have gotten to work with DXVA? I've tried Arcsoft and it didn't seem to work as the CPU is noticably high.

Thanks again!

[gplasky]

Try this first. Make sure to install the ATI Hitfix for AGP crads. (v8.10) from here:
ATI AGP hotfix

Then try running the .vbs reg fix to get the optimum settings:
ATI Tweaks

See if that helps.

Gerry

[pingmustard]

Tried the ATI AGP hotfix drivers... it seemed like that fixed playback outside sageTV (ie: Media Player Classic seemed to work more smoothly), but sageTV is playback was the end goal..

Then tried the ATI registry tweaks... no major noticable change..

Under both scenario, hardware acceleration is being used..

Any other ideas?

[pingmustard]

For those following this thread, I've gotten a fairly stable setup to play back both mpeg2 and h264.

I'm currently using the AGP hotfix driver above and the tweaks for it. For some odd reason, it prompted for 2 agp cards so I applied the tweaks to both cards (even though I only have 1). It's possible because it's a dual output card, that it was getting confused.

Anyway, in addition to that, I tweaked sageTV so that it would use the "Haali Media Spliter (AR)" (see
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...t+forward+h264) for details.

Inside sage, I'm using nVidia Purevideo for mpeg 2 video and audio. And i'm using cyberlink for the audio renderer and also h264 decoding WITH DXVA!


Hope that helps anyone else running into the same issues as me

[pingmustard]

I stand corrected.. My setup doesn't play live tv anymore. Recorded playback and videos work fine but live tv just dies if I try to load. SageTV literlly just hangs with the waiting circle.

Are there any other tweaks and config I can change to fix this ?? :

[eopian]

Try increasing the time behind live (i don't know the exact string) to 5 seconds or so. This worked great when I was having problems with livetv, but not recorded tv after I installed reclock on my main client.

Are you using overlay or VMR9?