Endless Paradigm

Are you talking about just general bad performance in Blu-Ray video? Such as dropped frames/stuttering/jerking/etc? If so read on - otherwise ignore this post ^_^

I only learnt all this within the past few months. FFDShow can't use hardware acceleration when playing MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 videos, which is what Blu-Ray is. Because your FFDShow is set to decode Hi-Def content, this is probably draining the poo poo out of your CPU cycles. I have an Athlon X2 5000+ (not that impressive) and it drains my CPU with 98-99% when playing any 1080p H.264 video, so I have to use GPU acceleration.

Try this first to see if your CPU is the culprit - Play a movie in MPlayerC-HC or whatever, and check the CPU usage of mplayerc.exe in Task Manager. If it's over 95% or so then yes, your CPU is being saturated  (you'd need a quad core to get smooth BluRay without hardware acceleration).

To get hardware acceleration, the easiest way is to install Cyberlink PowerDVD, enable hardware acceleration in PowerDVD settings, and set MPlayerC to Merit:Prefer for "Cyberlink AVC/H.264 Decoder" or whatever it's called (add it manually to external filters), and disable AVC/H.264 decoding in FFDShow. If you are an ATi graphics card user, that's all you need - but nVidia users also need to install PureVideo for PowerDVD to recognize your DXVA hardware accelerator in th GeForce.

Cyberlink can allow your GPU to accelerate not only MPEG4-AVC (H.264), but also MPEG4-ASP (DivX/XviD) and Windows Media 9 (WMV9). When I play 1080p content now, my CPU usage in MPlayerC-HC is never above 5% (depending on sound decoder, which is still software)

Hope that helps - if you want a step by step, just ask (PM if you want).

@bboy_sonik- I have a Core2Quad and a GeForce 8800GT.

The problem I was having was it was outputting Dolby Digital HD as Stereo, or saying it was in surround sound on my receiver, but still only putting out stereo with no dialog coming from the center speaker..

if its watching videos, combine community codec pack is the best i guess......

MPC FTWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kuu Wrote:@bboy_sonik- I have a Core2Quad and a GeForce 8800GT.

The problem I was having was it was outputting Dolby Digital HD as Stereo, or saying it was in surround sound on my receiver, but still only putting out stereo with no dialog coming from the center speaker..

Oh... so sorry then, I just made a massive spamhole. Meh. But yeah, these free codec packs are not too good with hi definition stuff. You can't beat PowerDVD9 for all that top-range stuff I reckon ;) Did you manage to fix it? Obviously it was a codec problem, and your soundcard was outputting the digital stream fine.

bboy_sonik Wrote:Try this first to see if your CPU is the culprit - Play a movie in MPlayerC-HC or whatever, and check the CPU usage of mplayerc.exe in Task Manager. If it's over 95% or so then yes, your CPU is being saturated  (you'd need a quad core to get smooth BluRay without hardware acceleration).

Nah, a mid-end dual core + a good decoder like CoreAVC should easily be able to pull it. IMO even something like an E5200 should easy mode it.

I have a low end quad core (x9550), and I can run 2 1080p at the same time.

Ah my mistake. I'm used to people having bogged-down-with-malware-and-whatnot PC's who always complain that the FPSz aint hoonin' :P CoreAVC is much faster than FFDShow ;) They say it's the fastest software AVC decoder there is (software meaning without using NVIDIA PureVideo or ATi AVIVO hardware acceleration)

And I run an AMD X2 5000+, so an E5200 is probably faster. LOL.

My Athlon X2 4200+ could just make 1080p reasonably with CoreAVC, though it did somewhat struggle.

bboy_sonik Wrote:Ah my mistake. I'm used to people having bogged-down-with-malware-and-whatnot PC's who always complain that the FPSz aint hoonin' :P CoreAVC is much faster than FFDShow ;) They say it's the fastest software AVC decoder there is (software meaning without using NVIDIA PureVideo or ATi AVIVO hardware acceleration)

From my testing, around 35-40% faster. For an Intel Atom @ 2GHz.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:My Athlon X2 4200+ could just make 1080p reasonably with CoreAVC, though it did somewhat struggle.

Anime?

Try some high bit rate real life movie. Will most likely choke.

Yeah I'm on a X2 5000+ (with a tiny O'C) and still have to use a hardware decoder, CoreAVC skips a couple of frames every few seconds. You can hardly notice it, until you switch on the Cyberlink decoder and think "Oh - That's what full framerate looks like!"