MPC HC codec jitters video/audio

[sflamm]

Trying to install DXVA codec for VC-1 on a SageTV Client running on a very old machine (Athlon XP 2100) with an AGP HD Radeon 4650 card. (on Windows 7 32-bit)

Installed MPC standalone codec (along with Haali and ACFilter) - able to use DXVA to decode video. Problem is the video and audio has a constant choppiness/jitter. The jitter improves a little if I switch from ACFilter to SageTV audio filter, but not by much.

I changed the value of te EnableSageTVDemux in the registry but it did not appear to make a change at all.

Can anyone let me know how to fix?

Thanks in advance.


Currently

[sflamm]

Btw, installed the full MPC HA player to see if it was possible to get good playback - and it works perfectly (better than perfect - video/audio is great and CPU usage is very low)

How do I get that to happen with standalone codec and SageTV?

[sflamm]

Inside MPC Player it says: DXVA Mode: VC-1 Bitstream Decoder
Inside Graphedit it says: DXVA Mode: Not Using DXVA

How do I enable DXVA for the standalone MPC filter?

[sflamm]

Inside MPC Player it says: DXVA Mode: VC-1 Bitstream Decoder
Inside Graphedit it says: DXVA Mode: Not Using DXVA

How do I enable DXVA for the standalone MPC filter?

Thanks in advance.

* merged with existing question *

[Thomas Wischgol]

As far as I know hardware acceleration only works with a small set of Nvidia cards. Hence, decoding takes quite a bit of CPU on most systems. I have a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo which seems to work if it can use both cores. I would assume that your CPU is simple too under powered.

Thomas

[sflamm]

It works with the ATI HD 4650

I can manually pick the MPC DVXA codec from the list (using "show all") for the VC-1 codec

It runs very quickly - inside SageTV. CPU use is down under 50% or less.

Problem is that it stutters/jitters all over the place.

How do I stop that?

[Rico66]

The problem is with the Sage splitter. Your best way out is to use MPC as external player for vc1, since the Sage splitter doesn't get fixed anymore.

[sflamm]

The issue occurs inside SageTV and outside - using GraphEdit.
I would think that makes it not SageTV specific.

How do you get SageTV to automatically use MPC for VC -1 content only?

[Rico66]

Originally Posted by sflamm

The issue occurs inside SageTV and outside - using GraphEdit.
I would think that makes it not SageTV specific.

How do you get SageTV to automatically use MPC for VC -1 content only?

Looks like I misunderstood you, if you have the same problem in mpc stand-alone. I only had vc1 problems within Sage, but not in mpc.
The easiest way to call an external player is with the external player plugin. That's not really automated as you basically run the external player by pressing another button instead of "play", but it works fine, if you know the content type.

[panteragstk]

Vc-1 is awful in sage. I just use .mkv for all vc-1 and disable the sage splitter. Then I can use any decoder I want without issue.

[sflamm]

Works fine using standalone MPC player - in fact perfectly.
Taking video inside GraphEdit and playing there results in stuttering (more like shaking left to right) video but obviously using DXVA (smooth but shaking)
I have native SageTv splitter disabled and inside SageTv same result as GraphEdit

All my VC1 videos are inside m2ts containers. (that's how they are ripped)

[panteragstk]

Disabling the sage splitter only disables the splitter for .mkv, .mov, etc. .m2ts is handled by another sage splitter that you don't want to disable or you can't watch livetv. Playback in other apps vs sage means nothing in this situation. I tried for a long time to get vc-1 to work and eventually just changed them from .m2ts to .mkv. Easy enough.

[sflamm]

On most of my SageTV clients I use the Arcsoft 2.x decoder to play VC-1 perfectly (SageTV 7 / Windows 7). Just registered the Arcsoft codec, selected it in SageTV and everything was fine...

However, for some reason on this box every time I try to use Arcsoft decoder SageTV literally crashes and there is a log with some sort of memory/pointer exception... Not sure why that happens on this box but no other... any ideas?

Also, it seems that the microsoft VC-1 codec doesnt know how to deal with AC3 sounds.. as I can play it in graphedit using the microsoft codec but no sound...

btw, what do you use to convert .m2ts to .mkv? are you ripping directly to mkv and if so what are you using?

[panteragstk]

I use tsmuxer to strip out (dumux) the audio, video, and subs from the original .m2ts stream. Then i use mkvtoolnix v 4.1.1 (this is the only version that works perfectly for me, all others do strange things to the files that make them unplayable). Then I can play them without issue using ffdshow, mpc-hc, arcsoft, or lav cuvid (nvidia only). I've also gotten the best results with the mpc-hc splitter (gabest) inside of sagetv.