What is your favourite H.264 decoder on Win 7?

[Eug]

In Win 7, I had some serious problems with CCCP's and Shark007's codec packs. They work, and depending on the hardware, may provide DVXA support for capable GPUs, but performance isn't good enough for some of the most complex stuff on lower end hardware.

So, I removed all that stuff, and just installed DivX's H.264 codec pack (minus all the other junk that comes with the installer), turned on DVXA acceleration in its settings, and just used Windows Media Player. That gave very good performance, both on NVIDIA ION (Atom 330), and Intel 4500MHD (Pentium SU4100). Stuff that stuttered with CCCP + WMP or CCCP + MPC-HC played smoothly with DivX H.264 + WMP.

An alternate is the self-contained Splash Player Lite. It has excellent performance when you activate DVXA (listed in the settings as PureVideo for NVIDIA and ClearVideo for Intel), but on spanned monitors there sometimes can be momentary glitches on some hardware, and I found it to be a bit more picky with certain files.

Not only can those two options provide better performance, the interface is a lot simpler, good for those of us who aren't as knowledgable about every little ffdshow tweak or whatever.

I also tried splayer, but the performance was terrible, at least how I had it set up.

What do you use for H.264 decode acceleration, esp. on lower end hardware? On higher end hardware it may even be somewhat irrelevant, since it all can be done by the CPU.

 

[Bryf50]

For dxva I use the decoder built into mpc-hc. But most of the time I use ffdshow with the ffmpeg-mt decoder. This gives really good performance on multi-core systems and I don't have to worry about dxva which can be buggy depending on the video.

 

[IGemini]

I also use MPC Homecinema, onboard codecs when possible--only other thing that needs installing is QT Lite for playing video from my camera (MOV, how I loathe thee). Never really had any problems with buggy video, usually it just meant the encoding quality sucked. 1080p clips play with negligible impact on the CPU after it's loaded.

 

[Eug]

For dxva I use the decoder built into mpc-hc. But most of the time I use ffdshow with the ffmpeg-mt decoder. This gives really good performance on multi-core systems and I don't have to worry about dxva which can be buggy depending on the video.

Ah yes. Unfortunately for the two systems I'm using, neither is fast enough to do CPU-only decoding: 1.6 GHz dual-core Atom 330, and 1.3 GHz Pentium dual core SU4100, the latter being the same as 1.3 GHz Core 2 Duo, but with 1 MB out of 3 MB disabled.

I also use MPC Homecinema, onboard codecs when possible--only other thing that needs installing is QT Lite for playing video from my camera (MOV, how I loathe thee). Never really had any problems with buggy video, usually it just meant the encoding quality sucked. 1080p clips play with negligible impact on the CPU after it's loaded.

I'll check out QT Lite. I don't think it will help for playback (see above) so I'll still have to use WMP to play that. However, the description says it has a QT MOV download function, which stupidly is a Pro ($) feature with the regular Apple Quicktime Player.

In any case, my post here was to suggest that it seems that the complex MPC-HC, although powerful, may be more suited to somewhat more powerful systems. On some marginal hardware such as mine, it chokes on some higher bitrate material, at least with the various settings I've tried.

Or is there a simple DVXA toggle somewhere in MPC-HC that I missed? I had been fiddling with various Haali settings, as well as CCCP.

I will say that it worked most of the time with my ION setup, which is NVIDIA 9400M based I believe, but it didn't handle the hardest stuff as well.

It didn't seem to work right with my 4500MHD setup, but this page seems to say it doesn't support DVXA on Intel.

 

[IGemini]

QT Lite isn't really performance-enhancing, just mentioning it in my case for MOV playback (which only works w/32-bit players, it seems). In MPC you want to make sure that for Windows 7 you're using EVR (Custom), if DXVA is working there will be a label for it in the status bar when you're playing media supported by it. It's odd it won't work for the 4500MHD which does support full acceleration.

For lower-powered systems, VLC seems to work better. They just released 1.1.5 that explicitly lists support for Intel IGPs, so you may have luck there. I found DXVA to be really buggy with it, but that may have just been the previous version.

 

[Eug]

Ah, perfect timing. I wasn't aware VLC 1.1.5 had implemented this.

"GPU HD decoding using Intel IGP on Windows, using DxVA2"

I had been playing with previous version and decided against using VLC, but now I'll give it another shot.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Doesn't Win7's native h.264 codec use DXVA when possible? I just install haali and ac3filter on Win7. If I use a codec pack, I like k-lite.

 

[Eug]

Doesn't Win7's native h.264 codec use DXVA when possible?

Win 7 doesn't natively support MKV.

You can play H.264 in Windows Media Player, but not in MKV format without installing something else first.

EDIT:

Like you said, all you need is Haali and ac3filter. Works well.

 

[MadScientist]

VLC media player

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

 

[0roo0roo]

coreavc is hard to beat. esp with cuda accel.

 

[Eug]

coreavc is hard to beat. esp with cuda accel.

So why CoreAVC vs Microsoft's DXVA decoder, considering the latter is "free" at least on Windows 7.

With Haali and ac3filter I'm getting <15&#37; CPU utilization with the SU4100 playing 1080p H.264 in WMP. It's also quite low on my Atom ION setup.

BTW, MPC-HC seems to function MUCH better on these systems with CCCP removed, just using Microsoft's DXVA decoder with Haali and ac3filter. Thanks Gooberlx2.

Since my first post, I've now uninstalled DivX's H.264 codec actually, since it's less efficient.

P.S. Intel's driver's suck. If I plug in this netbook to an HD LCD monitor, I get the full 1920x1200 resolution. However, if I plug in this netbook to my LCD TV or my LCD projector, I get underscan with the 1080p (or a 720p) signal. It seems that Intel has decided that TVs need serious underscan, but there is no toggle to turn off this underscan. Why Intel would force underscan a 1080p signal on a modern TV is beyond me. I am running the Intel official drivers, not Acer's OEM'd version. Also, the contrast/brightness is way off. If I use VGA, everything is fine at 1080p on the same TV.

I used to have similarly weird issues on my Mac a few years ago, but the latest OSes include 1080i and 720p TV settings which have proper pixel-perfect mapping for 1080 and 720.

I would have thought this would have been one of the first things that any graphics provider could get right, esp. for a product that can output HDMI, but I was unfortunately very mistaken about that.

 

[0roo0roo]

coreavc seems more able to play variety of mkv and such, i think dxva requires tighter compliance

 

[Eug]

Oh, I see.

If a file doesn't play on my Atom or SU4100 machines, then I might have to use my MacBook Pro instead anyway - pure CPU playback - C2D 2.26 GHz. The Atom and SU4100 would be too slow to consistently handle high-bitrate 1080p content without DxVA.

 

[vmarkx3]

VLC 1.15 is great, lot less issues and really good performer.