DXVA videos corrupted / pixelated with ATI card

[rahzel]

i just got an ATI card (HD3450) and playing DXVA, its really juddery and pixelated. non-DXVA videos (L5.1) play properly (no pixelation) just DXVA videos. if i fullscreen the video immediately, its not as bad. i'm using VMR9 renderless mode, 3d surfaces, vmr9 mixer mode checked, back-buffer is locked (to prevent tearing) and bicubic 1.00 resizer. even with the back-buffer unlocked, i have the same problem.

my specs:
AMD BE-2350
2GB of ram
XP Pro SP3
ASUS EAH3450 (ATI HD 3450)

i tried the latest video card drivers and its even worse, so i reverted back to the drivers that were included on the disc.

i've attached some screenshots to show whats happening.
http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot20080908235704be8.jpg
http://img384.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot20080908235734hv1.jpg
http://img257.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot20080909000027bfy4.jpg

edit: sorry mod, didn't resize pics. i thought they just showed up as attachments at the bottom.

[Sharktooth]

what video drivers version are you using?
also, are you sure the video is DXVA "compliant"?

[rahzel]

what video drivers version are you using?
also, are you sure the video is DXVA "compliant"?
i mentioned this in the MPC HC thread, but i used the latest drivers and it was even worse. went back to the drivers that were on the CD and it was better. i made sure i removed all traces of the old driver with Driver Sweeper.

and yeah, its only movies that comply with the DXVA rules that have this problem (ie: l4.1 etc. etc.). on second thought, i dunno if its just DXVA movies, because i have MPC HC set so that it uses the internal DXVA filter for only the movies are are DXVA compliant, and it uses CoreAVC for all other H264 videos.

[ChronoReverse]

Can you post a sample?

[MartinAF]

if you are using windows xp then know this that MPC DXVA and ATI dont work on XP
i had the same problem
switched to vista x64 and both x86 and x64 builds work great with videos that did not work on XP
i have a HD3870

[cmw]

well that can't be right, i have xp and an ati card and according to mpc, the compliant vids are played with dxva on, and i don't have any problems (except with some ugly h264 in avi files, but since that's a bad idea anyway i can see why it would be troublsome).

@rahzel: did you try to disable dxva with mpc hc? is playback clear then? Also, try to use Haali Renderer, I have strange overall image corruption (picture quality just gets a lot worse) when I use VMR9 (in my case, the problem is that UltraVNC video hooks interfere somehow with VMR, but has no effect on Haali).

[rahzel]

Can you post a sample?
not needed as the same video plays fine on my computer (its my brother thats having the problem).

and i have XP Pro SP3 as well as an ATI card, and i have no problems. i do have tearing issues, but no corrupt video such as this.

@cmw, yes, it plays fine on anything other than VMR9. i haven't tried disabling dxva though and i'm not at his house right now.

with all the issues i'm having on getting DXVA working properly (especially on my brothers ATI rig, as well as my own), i'm tempted to say screw it and just use CoreAVC. Nvidia's drivers etc. seem to be more reliable, so i don't really have any problems with my Nvidia rig.

[ChronoReverse]

Hold on. DXVA works in VMR9 mode now?

Which version of MPCHC are you using?

[Kado]

H264 DXVA uses VMR9 for XP and EVR for Vista.

[ChronoReverse]

Okay. I've tested this on my XP SP3 machine with a 3400 using Catalyst 8.3.

It seems when I set VMR9 renderless, I get the same kind of issue rahzel is getting. If I set it to EVR, the issues go away. Here's the weird part, VMR9 windowed has no issues either.

[rahzel]

how are you using EVR with XP?

[ChronoReverse]

You just have to install .Net 3

Hopefully this workaround... erm, works for you =)

[Sharktooth]

...and update your catalyst drivers...

[rahzel]

@ChronoReverse, thanks! i can now use this on my machine as well. ill maybe go over to his house later tonight and see if this resolves the issue.

@ Sharktooth, well again, i did get the latest drivers for him, but it made things worse. but ill see if using EVR works, and if so, ill update to the latest drivers again.

now that i have the EVR renderer options available, how many EVR buffers is recommended? i have no idea what this even does, so if someone could point me in the right direction, that would be great. :) i did a search in the MPC HC DXVA thread, but there was a bunch of pages and thought it would be impossible to find it.

[cmw]

I just tested and EVR + DXVA does not work on XP. I also ran into a rather annoying problem with VMR7/9 myself, allthough it's not exactly like yours and has not really something to do with DXVA.

[IanD]

I'm getting similar pixelated video effects in XP with Nvidia 8600GT, latest beta drivers and MPC-HC in DXVA mode with overlay and VMR7. If I disable DXVA in MPC-HC, all is well. This is with multiple H.264 downloads and conversion of HD-DVD and Bluray titles to mkv, so at least some of them must be dxva compatible.

[tetsuo55]

...and update your catalyst drivers...

The newer Catalyst drivers break DXVA for certain card/os combinations so i would advice against that.

[rica]

Hi, why do you insist on using EVR on XP?
With your ati card, Overlay Mixer(for h264) or VMR9 (for mpeg2 and h264) would be the best choice.

Edit: get this as well:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en&Hash=12nSFacpyvdSW%2bkSIqNiGmymKfx5XparG4usBelDDtGdIp41tSu7tjIJLfEfHBG11TQX6SS4XySFa7oz9oQvDA%3d%3d

[CruNcher]

@rica
I learned with the Unified Driver Architecture never expect a issue or quality performance/advice for your GFX chip generation to be the same for someone else with another Generation until fully tested by a big amount of users to be a general problem or quality advise throughout all Generations, it could be completely different for every Generation :D as tetsuo55 allready said :).

[rica]

@CruNcher,

New genaration of ati means newer generation of issues to me, always :D

General rule: never use latest buggy version of ati FW:)

[rahzel]

well, vmr9 is giving him this issue. ill tell him to try overlay and see if that helps. i tried it on my machine and its tear free, so i think ill stick with this.

so what are the advantages of using overlay vs the system default? i know vmr9 and evr have extra options you can tweak.

[rica]

well, vmr9 is giving him this issue. ill tell him to try overlay and see if that helps. i tried it on my machine and its tear free, so i think ill stick with this.

so what are the advantages of using overlay vs the system default? i know vmr9 and evr have extra options you can tweak.

Tell him not to trust the defaults of the OS but just to trust his own eyes :)

[cmw]

with overlay you cannot make screenshots of videos, if you have multiple monitors, you can see video only on the primary device and you can't use subtitles.

[rica]

VMR 9 if you wanna get SSs. VMR9 Renderless for subtitles.
If you are still living issues, reinstall everything from the beginning.

[cmw]

Well I'm running VMR9 renderless + MPC-HC (svn build) + dxva now and it works flawlessly, no artifacts, nothing.

card is hd 4870, using newest catalyst: 8.8

when dxva isn't available though i get bad yv12 to rgb conversion, resulting in pixelation (see other thread i started), this is solved however by letting sd (xvid etc) content be decoded by ffdshow and disabling all yuv output support there so it's forced to make the colorspace conversion on the cpu rather than the gpu, which results in sweet quality.

[rahzel]

if i use VMR renderless, i get some tearing, even if i lock the back buffer. i'm have a 780G/HD3200 integrated GPU. i don't care about subtitles or taking screenshots, so i guess ill stick with overlay.

[cr0]

I have the same problem with Vista x64 and an ATI 4850 with the 8.11 drivers and x264/h264 content under DXVA. I'm using similar settings (except with EVR Custom) in MPC-HC (latest official build).

What's really weird, is I don't see any corruption so long as I keep MPC-HC windowed and relatively small in size (say 1280x720). If I full screen or maximize the window I'll immediately get display corruption. Starting full screen or maximized doesn't seem to help the problem. I'm running at 1080p@60hz, I'll run some more tests to see if I can get a better estimate on the resolution at which corruption begins. Anyone know why window size may be causing the problem?

I don't have the problem with the 4870 in my desktop and the exact same setup. Although I'm running 1680x1050 there instead of 1080p.

I've tried many different things, Direct3D Full screen mode, subtitles on/off, different resize modes, lock back buffer on/off, different # of evr buffers, aero on/off. The only option which reduced corruption slightly was increasing the EVR buffers to maximum, but even then there was still frequent corruption, just not as much. Maybe more buffers would solve the problem?

If I use the Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 decoders I also see corruption, although I haven't done as extensive testing with them. I even see corruption using PowerDVD8 and trying to play MP4 files.

There are 8.12 drivers supposedly coming out on Wednesday (12/10), so maybe they'll fix the issue.

Has anyone experienced similar issues and found a work around?

Edit: After some more testing (and retesting), I've found it comes down to whether I'm using EVR Custom Pres or just plain EVR in MPC-HC. While regular EVR is fine for most videos, anything with subtitles is out of the question. Any ideas?

Edit 2: After some more testing, I can't reproduce corruption that I had with PowerDVD 8 when playing fullscreen or regular. However using PowerDVD codecs w/ MPC-HC causes corruption under EVR-Custom.

Edit 3: The highest resolution I can playback videos at without corruption is 1440x900. 1680x1050 or 1920x1080 will both cause corruption.