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orion44
25th December 2009, 14:02
I learned about this player a few days ago, and I decided to try it out.
This player is incredible!

I've got a AMD Sempron 2800+ CPU, 1GB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT 1GB.
I downloaded a HD trailer of the Bourne Ultimatum movie (x264, 1920 x 816, 7406 kbit/s).

When I played the trailer in Elecard MPEG player and Elecard DVD player
(they all have built-in HD video and audio decoders), the CPU usage was always 99%,
and the audio was out of sync a couple of seconds.

When I played the trailer in MPC Home Cinema, the CPU usage was about 10 to 15%!
The video quality is excellent, and the audio was in sync. It's incredible!
What video decoder is this player using?

I want to install just one HD audio and video decoder on my PC,
so that all my players can use it (BS Player, GOM player, Mplayer).
I wanted to install Elecard AVC decoder, but now I'm not sure if it will be fast enough.

Is there any HD directshow decoder that is effective as the MPC Home Cinema built-in video and audio decoder?
clsid
25th December 2009, 14:10
It uses an internal DXVA decoder. That uses your graphics card to do most of the video decoding.
namaiki
26th December 2009, 04:29
How about you just stick to using one media player - MPC-HC?
orion44
26th December 2009, 15:24
How about you just stick to using one media player - MPC-HC?

I would like to, but other players have better subtitle quality.
(MPC-HC uses DirectVobSub to display subtitles).

Subtitles in other mentioned players look more natural and seamless with the movie.

And I watch all my movies with enabled subtitles.
namaiki
26th December 2009, 15:39
You can use MPC-HC's internal subtitle renderer as well.

I would think that DirectVobSub's subtitles look more seamless as they are rendered with the same number of pixels as the video it is being overlayed (of course, that is my personal opinion).

Other DXVA filters should be about as efficient as the MPC-HC one, the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video filter(comes with most versions of Windows 7) being my preference for DXVA.
orion44
26th December 2009, 15:51
It uses an internal DXVA decoder. That uses your graphics card to do most of the video decoding.

Thanks. I guess that explains the low CPU usage.
orion44
26th December 2009, 17:21
Other DXVA filters should be about as efficient as the MPC-HC one, the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video filter(comes with most versions of Windows 7) being my preference for DXVA.

I solved the problem.

I just installed CoreAVC 2.0 codec, and it's amazing.

I played the Bourne Ultimatum trailer (x264, 1920 x 816, 7406 kbit/s)
on an old version of BS Player, and the CPU usage is only about 20 %.
Also, the player seeking is very fast.
namaiki
26th December 2009, 23:59
I don't see why you had to use 'an old version of BS Player' to get CoreAVC 2.0 to work..
orion44
27th December 2009, 00:28
I don't see why you had to use 'an old version of BS Player' to get CoreAVC 2.0 to work..

Well, this old version is the only one I've got installed on my PC.
It's from 2005. So, I just mentioned that it's an old version and that it works great.

And it's much better than the latest 'pro' version. Newer doesn't necessarily mean better.
namaiki
27th December 2009, 00:33
Well, this old version is the only one I've got installed on my PC.
It's from 2005. So, I just mentioned that it's an old version and that it works great.

And it's much better than the latest 'pro' version. Newer doesn't necessarily mean better.

oh yeah.. you're the guy who doesn't want to use MPC-HC. Sorry, forgot.
orion44
27th December 2009, 00:38
oh yeah.. you're the guy who doesn't want to use MPC-HC. Sorry, forgot.

No problem.
tetsuo55
27th December 2009, 11:42
Why dont you want to use mpc-hc?
orion44
27th December 2009, 17:44
Why dont you want to use mpc-hc?

I am using it. It's one of the best players that I've come across.
The only thing that bothers me with this player is the look and quality of generated subtitles.

In other three players that I use (BSPlayer, GOM Player, KMPlayer), the subtitles are perfect.
They look natural and seamless on the movie, after you set them up correctly in the players
subtitle options (font, color, size).

In MPC-HC, no matter which settings I choose, the subtitles still don't look as good
as in other mentioned players. At least to me.

I'm guessing it has something to do with that DirectVobSub filter.
Other players don't use this filter.
tetsuo55
27th December 2009, 17:52
I am using it. It's one of the best players that I've come across.
The only thing that bothers me with this player is the look and quality of generated subtitles.

In other three players that I use (BSPlayer, GOM Player, KMPlayer), the subtitles are perfect.
They look natural and seamless on the movie, after you set them up correctly in the players
subtitle options (font, color, size).

In MPC-HC, no matter which settings I choose, the subtitles still don't look as good
as in other mentioned players. At least to me.

I'm guessing it has something to do with that DirectVobSub filter.
Other players don't use this filter.do you mean that the subtitles generated by mpc-hc are too sharp?
Can you show me some screenshots comparing the different results?
Keiyakusha
27th December 2009, 18:14
Oh, by the way about sharpness of the subs. Is it possible to add an option "auto-adjust" which will match texture resolution to video resolution?
tetsuo55
27th December 2009, 18:16
Oh, by the way about sharpness of the subs. Is it possible to add an option "auto-adjust" which will match texture resolution to video resolution?I have heard this request before, someone will have to write a patch for that(we are not interested in this).
orion44
27th December 2009, 19:56
do you mean that the subtitles generated by mpc-hc are too sharp?
Can you show me some screenshots comparing the different results?

No, just the opposite.
The subtitles generated by MPC-HC look a little blurry when compared to those in BSPlayer.

In BSPlayer and other players,
the subtitles look like they are 'part of the movie', and are pleasant to watch.

Well, at least to me.

Here are some screenshots...

BSPlayer screen:
http://i46.tinypic.com/2hnc2mc.png

MPC-HC screen:
http://i45.tinypic.com/2wez5s0.png

Look at the words 'Kid' & 'and', and you will see that they look a little blurry when compared to BSPlayer subs.

You may want to increase brightness to see it better, if the picture on your monitor looks darker.
tetsuo55
27th December 2009, 20:39
that clearly looks like a misconfiguration, the mpc-hc subtitle renderer should look a lot better than the bsplayer one.

Here are the settings you need to use:

View>Options
Playback> check "auto-load subtitles"
External filters> add both versions of "directvobsub" and set them to "block"
Subtitles> set "maximum texture resolution" to "desktop"
orion44
27th December 2009, 21:03
that clearly looks like a misconfiguration, the mpc-hc subtitle renderer should look a lot better than the bsplayer one.

Here are the settings you need to use:

View>Options
Playback> check "auto-load subtitles"
External filters> add both versions of "directvobsub" and set them to "block"
Subtitles> set "maximum texture resolution" to "desktop"

Wow! I just set "Maximum Texture Resolution" to "Desktop",
and the subtitles look much better! Another problem solved. Thanks.

By the way, is there any other option I should be aware, that increases subtitle quality?

What does the option "link alpha channels" do?
saint-francis
27th December 2009, 21:45
that clearly looks like a misconfiguration, the mpc-hc subtitle renderer should look a lot better than the bsplayer one.

Here are the settings you need to use:

View>Options
Playback> check "auto-load subtitles"
External filters> add both versions of "directvobsub" and set them to "block"
Subtitles> set "maximum texture resolution" to "desktop"

Why is it not set to "Desktop" by default?
tetsuo55
27th December 2009, 22:20
Wow! I just set "Maximum Texture Resolution" to "Desktop",
and the subtitles look much better! Another problem solved. Thanks.thought so.

By the way, is there any other option I should be aware, that increases subtitle quality?not that i know of

What does the option "link alpha channels" do?i have no idea, i dont change any subtitle options except the desktop resolution
Why is it not set to "Desktop" by default?It greatly increases the overhead which causes stuttering weaker hardware.
ChronoReverse
31st December 2009, 03:05
Yeah, the overhead of the internal subtitler is pretty hefty. Using Desktop on my system (Q9450 @3.2GHz) will still yield some stutter (as well as some jitter that I don't notice in the video but the Display Stats graph shows) which is rather amazing to me. In the end I went back to directvobsub (with frame size doubling when the resolution is low) so I could run it without pre-buffering.

Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but it seems rather odd that this would be a problem.
namaiki
31st December 2009, 03:15
Using 'Desktop' on my system (Q9450 @3.2GHz) will still yield some stutter (as well as some jitter that I don't notice in the video but the Display Stats graph shows) which is rather amazing to me.

Very noticable stutter in video with panning scenes with subtitles on, on my 4500MHD but not on the same computer with a 9600M GT. I don't understand, but yeah, I'm also using VSFilter now.
ChronoReverse
31st December 2009, 05:30
Well, my video card is a GTX260 so there's no slack there either =/
tetsuo55
31st December 2009, 08:07
Both renderers are near identical, the fact that vsfilter is helping also means that if you set the internal renderer to the lowest resolution stuttering should go away.
ChronoReverse
31st December 2009, 08:57
Well, vsfilter would use the resolution of the video right? The video in question is a 1080p clip. With MPCHC, I had already been limiting the resolution to 1024x768 but still had the problem whereas vsfilter didn't seem to.

Furthermore, setting vsfilter to no-prebuffer is still smooth whereas the internal filter doesn't seem to be able to handle that.