Hardware acceleration for .mkv files in Windows Media Center?

[mazeroth]

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate and have been playing around with WMC and am blown away with how good it is! I would love to use it for my media library with my ripped movies but need hardware acceleration in order to decode 1080p. My motherboard has 780G graphics and I've been using Media Player Classic to decode. Is there any way I can use hardware acceleration with WMC, or am I stuck with getting CCCP and ffdshow and letting my CPU "try" to decode them? My CPU is an Athlon2 X2 7750 black edition. Basically, a first generation Phenom with only 2 cores at 2.7 ghz. stock.

Thanks for any help!

 

[shangshang]

no hardware accel with WMC. And I don't think hardware accel is workable with .mkv either. I have a Quad and never does it have a hiccup with 1080p mkv's

btw, this forum (although has the word 'video' in it) is not a really good place to ask about video playback. People around here are mostly interested in talking about the battle between AMD vs NV, and their quaterly financial reports. And discussing about other websites discussing about AMD vs NV.

 

[ImDonly1]

I don't know anything about windows media center, but windows media player does use the GPU to decode MKVs (x264). I am not sure but there should be a way to do it in WMC. I think you can get the decoder from media player classic home cinema (.ax file) and register it using the command line. This might give you GPU acceleration. Not really sure though.

 

[footballrunner800]

Its possible with the divx splitter on win7. You can download it here http://labs.divx.com/mkvwin7preview. You are going to have to download the AC3 filter for audio. Its only a beta right now so you dont get some things like subs or dual audio but it works perfect because it uses win 7 native hardware acceleration.

 

[lopri]

This trick was for Vista.

http://a8t8.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2518DD508BB713E8!220.entry

Now for Win7.

http://a8t8.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2518DD508BB713E8!802.entry

However, unlike the author's experience, I couldn't get it to work. I am guessing he was running 32-bit Windows but even for that you may need some luck. Besides now they bundled it with regular DivX and that's another turn-off. (Also DivX broke my other installed codecs)

 

[lopri]

Just FYI, you only need to install two for Win7: Haali media splitter and AC3 filter. Nothing else. With those two installed WMP (not WMC) takes care of all manners of video playback. (except those weird-standard anime clips)

 

[shangshang]

I don't know anything about windows media center, but windows media player does use the GPU to decode MKVs (x264). I am not sure but there should be a way to do it in WMC. I think you can get the decoder from media player classic home cinema (.ax file) and register it using the command line. This might give you GPU acceleration. Not really sure though.

.mkv's (like .avi's) are just containers, and not a codec like x264. Hardware accel works on the codec level, not container level.

 

[ViRGE]

Just FYI, you only need to install two for Win7: Haali media splitter and AC3 filter. Nothing else. With those two installed WMP (not WMC) takes care of all manners of video playback. (except those weird-standard anime clips)

Bingo.

Win7's H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs have full DXVA support. If your hardware is capable of offloading them, then anything using those codecs (e.g. WMC) will automatically offload the work. As I believe the 780G does support H.264 offloading, you should be capable of doing it once you install a Matroska splitter.