ffdshow development #2

[plonk420]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
output is really bloody good on HW deinterlace though. somehow nicer than powerDVD, even though i would have thought they did the same thing.

powerDVD 5 and earlier weren't very good IMO. watchable, but nothing you couldn't do with a simple remove even or odd field and reinterpolate. i don't know much about 6, tho.

OTOH, WinDVD 6's capabilities blew my socks off. seems to run at 50/60fps with non standard (24p/25p/30p) material, or something like a variable framerate. a friend said that FRAPS reported 50fps on a PAL source clip with sped-up sections (lazy editors)

[Mug Funky]

powerDVD 5 did dumb-bob, i think... i'm not sure. maybe i'm thinking of winDVD, as that's the first DVD player i had (ever!), along with the crappy and now dead Samsung drive it came with.

but a dumb-bob is all i need - just something to allow me to TV-out without randomly reversing field-order. i don't mind a little blur when the alternative is stuttering.

[IgorC]

would ffdshow support decoding of coming soon h.264 Ateme? It´s not comfortable to install (nero rom + nerovisonexpress3) approx. 50 Mbytes

[akupenguin]

yes, Real Soon Now (tm). But don't hold your breath, because I'm mostly trying to implement features in parallel with x264, not with Ateme.

[RadicalEd]

Aku, I feel the need to express my deep, explicitly heterosexual love for you at this instant.

[therealjoeblow]

Originally posted by BlindWanderer
I have a file with muxed subs that i'm not exactly sure how they were prepared but...

ffdshow when rendering the subs displays a box character at the end of the each line (mpc doesn't do this). I suspect it's a line feed but i can't be sure. ( 0x0A or 0xOD); consequently could we have added a subtitle spy (text field that displays the last text to be rendered) and a character filter as to remove characters entered.

Probably a unicode text sub muxed in. Try using disabling ffdshow's sub support and using vsfilter as a test. You then must make sure that you configure vsfilter to use a *unicode capable font* (one of the several variations of Tahoma is - you have to pick the correct one from the dropdown box when you choose Tahoma). If the box disappears or becomes a proper character, that's what the problem is.

FFDshow doesn't support unicode subs at the moment. I've asked for it here in this forum a couple of times. Hopefully it will come soon.

(of course, if that doesn't get rid of the box, then this wasn't the issue and you can feel free to yell at me...)

[therealjoeblow]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
hhe.. my system is messed up, but it's not particularly slow considering it's age. it outperforms a lot of machines built this year, simply because i removed all the bloat from win2k that i could find.

Not wanting to get too far off topic, could you provide a brief list of exactly what bloat you got rid of (and maybe how if it was complex)?

[Mug Funky]

i think there's possibly a memory leak while using AVIS for frameserving. i was serving a 2 gig DV file through avisynth into mencoder using AVIS, and towards the end my hard disk nearly exploded from swapping - i was using nearly 2 gigs of VM. not sure which part of the chain was doing it, but loading the DV file straight in gives me a constant memory usage, rather than an ever-increasing one.

tried both directshowsource and avisource in my script, but in both cases ffdshow was being used to decode, and also to serve. this may have something to do with it.

no big rush on this one - i should really start using avs2yuv anyway.

@ therealjoeblow:

hmm. while searching for a way to turn off windows messenger, i found (and subsequently lost) a page that described what all the windows services do, and which you could do without.

i'm sure a random google will turn up that page, or one like it. it's just a matter of a lot of registry hacking and disabling services through control panel's administrative tools.

i imagine it's harder to find all this in winXP... man, i am so glad i'm not running that - it's painful enough just to use it.

[iradic]

@therealjoeblow: try this ... http://www.techspot.com/guides-os.shtml

[leeperry]

i used to run ffdshow-20020617.exe which has always worked fine with all my WMV movies but the newest I could put my hands on : ffdshow-20041012-sse.exe, usually gives a BLACKSCREEN..

I've tried upgrading DirectX to 9.0c, and WMP to v10, to no success, and of course the old version worked like a champ when I downgraded..so something's broken like the default renderer or sumthing?

I run XP SP1, with the 61.76 Detonators on a Geforce4 Ti4200.

Could anyone see wth wrong ?
It's annoying to disable FFDSHOW each time

But apart from that, great piece of software!! 2 thumbs up

[Mug Funky]

hmm, as much as i don't like to deal with WMV, i've found that it works fine here. have you double-checked the codec settings so WMV is actually set to be decoded? the only thing i've tested with is the WMV of anna-nicole making a fool of herself at the AMAs the other week.

i'm playing through media player classic, on a p3 733, geforce DDR 32 (old old old).

[BlindWanderer]

Got a couple of bugs related to the Bitmap overlay.

1. can't use Vertical pos to push the overlay out of the frame.
2. extra line added to Bitmap overlay if overlay is of an uneven number of vertical lines (probably related to my input video being yv12). This extra line it adds is junk.

I'm using the December 1, build that milan posted for localizing ffdshow.

[Cyberace]

Hope I'm posting in the correct thread and are not off-topic with this request:

Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration (DirectX VA) support

This feature/function request is both for hardware acceleration (motion compensation) and post-processing via Microsofts DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API, (be nice if the options should be added in to FFdshow config settings when auto-detect if the video cards supported it and to what extent );

Hope FFdshow developer(s) can look into if this could be fully or partially used for most of its supported codecs?

Summery: Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) allows DirectShow based software decoders to accelerate video playback directly on the graphics processors (GPU). If your graphics processor supports DXVA and has built-in technology to accelerate DVD and MPEG-2 file playback, then DXVA can provide (GPU) hardware acceleration. DVXA is an application programming interface (API) and a corresponding motion compensation device driver interface (DDI) for acceleration of digital video decoding. DDIs are also provided as part of DXVA; a deinterlacing DDI for deinterlacing and frame-rate conversion of video content, and a to support ProcAmp DDI control and postprocessing of video content. DXVA provides an interface definition focused on support of MPEG-2 "main profile" video (formally ITU-T H.262 | ISO/IEC 13818-2), but is also intended to support other key video codecs (for example, ITU-T Recommendations H.263 and H.261, and MPEG-1 and MPEG-4).

A good exampel of the benifits of using DVXA for video acceleration is that you could decode HDTV (ATSC/DTV) MPEG-2 with a PIII 733Mhz CPU, a task that would normaly require a PIII 1400Mhz CPU if the card does not support DVXA HWMC. Or if you have a faster CPU then you can record something at the same time as you are playing back something else on the same Windows PC, (as with DXVA most of the playback effort gets loaded onto the GPU so the CPU can be doing something more/else).

Other post-processing featutes achivable via DVXA (if the video adapter hardware support it):
- Hardware iDCT motion compensation and subpicture decoding
- Hardware based IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform)
- IQ (Inverse quantization)
- Fullframe video playback of HDTV and DVD content on slow CPU's (733Mhz +)
- Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
- Hardware colorspace conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- 5tap horizontal by 3tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
- Perpixel color keying
- Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD subpicture alphablended compositing
- Alpha-Blending Surface

Developer links:
- Microsoft Developer information on DirectX Video Acceleration
- How Decoders Use IAMVideoAccelerator
- Mapping DirectX Video Acceleration to IAMVideoAccelerator
- DVXA API/DDI Specification (Rev 1.0) (DirectX 8.1 C++ Archive)
- DirectShow DirectX Video Acceleration Video Subtypes
- Enabling DirectX Video Acceleration in a custom player
- Windows Media Format 9.5 SDK Enabling DirectX Video Acceleration
- DirectX Video Acceleration Video Subtypes (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive)
- IAMVideoAccelerator Operational Specification (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive)
- DirectX Video Acceleration Motion Compensation Callbacks
- Calling the Deinterlace DDI from a User-Mode Component
- Per-Pixel Alpha Blending (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive)
....AND MUCH MORE available on a Microsoft Development Network search

Exampel of above DXVA technology in use is the newly announced "nVIDIA DVD Decoder", (as almost GForce/nForce GPU's support it).
nVIDIA DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) support MPEG-2 acceleration for:
Inverse quantization (IQ),
Inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT)
Motion compensation (mo comp)
Enables advanced de-interlacing
Decodes high-definition MPEG-2
http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/decoder_faq.html
(nVIDIA's part in the GPU that support this is called HDVP (High Defininition Video Processor) / VPE (Video Processing Engine))

PS! My personal reason for wanting DXVA support by FFdshow is to have HDTV playback of MPEG-2/TS on slow PC

[Boco]

Think there might be a bug in divx 3 decoding. I got a file that crashes to the desktop when CelticDruid's latest build tries to decode it, but runs with the latest alpha on sourceforge (albet with a large green line on the bottem). I am using the cvs build (6.4.8.3) of MPC.

[celtic_druid]

No problems here with DivX 3 decoding either via dshow or VFW. Only tested two files though.

[Boco]

It was in a download of 26 similar video files. Only 1 crashed on open, and 1 other one crashed after playing for awhile. The rest played fine...

[dragongodz]

It was in a download of a 26 episode series.

[spyder]

@Cyberace

I believe it would be difficult to use DXVA in ffdshow's MPEG2 decoding as it's based on libmpeg2 which does all of those accelerated things internally. It could probably be used for scaling/deinterlacing etc though. On a side note, why do you need ffdshow for decoding HDTV MPEG2? Most software DVD player MPEG2 decoders will play it fine and even use DXVA to do it. I can play 1080i content with about 20-30% CPU usage on my 2500+ Athlon XP

[marius1]

Which version of AC3Filter's code is in the 1012 version of ffdshow? For AC3 encoding am I better off sticking to ffdshow or should I use the RC5 of AC3Filter? Thanks in advance.

[Cyberace]

Originally posted by spyder
@Cyberace

I believe it would be difficult to use DXVA in ffdshow's MPEG2 decoding as it's based on libmpeg2 which does all of those accelerated things internally. It could probably be used for scaling/deinterlacing etc though. On a side note, why do you need ffdshow for decoding HDTV MPEG2? Most software DVD player MPEG2 decoders will play it fine and even use DXVA to do it. I can play 1080i content with about 20-30% CPU usage on my 2500+ Athlon XP

"difficult" or impossible? ...every little helps and never say never
(I got a 800Mhz PIII (underclocked) fanless PC as HTPC, yes I'm poor)
PS! Others could have faster PCs' but encoders running simultaneously