LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[egur]

Originally Posted by karl_lillevold

I am trying to get madVR to work along with the LAV video decoder using Intel QuickSync decoding, running in MPC-HC with Lucid Virtu. It works great with EVR Custom Pres, but with madVR there is no video. Graphstudio exhibits the same behavior - opens a video window, plays audio, but no video.

I have a SandyBridge 2500K, and I am using a discrete ATI Radeon 6450 because I cannot get the integrated Intel HD Graphics to display colors well on my HDTV.

If I remove the ATI card (so Lucid Virtu is not being used), playback works as expected (but poor color saturation).

if I use DXVA Copy-back on the ATI card, (and disable Lucid Virtu), playback also works.

I know this is perhaps an odd combination, but I would prefer QuickSync decoding, due to its better efficiency. (It can play Crowd.Run without skipping frames, the ATI card cannot. The fanless ATI card also runs hot while decoding Blu-ray resolutions).

Using Lucid Virtu implies the following:
* All DirectX/DXVA will go to the iGPU.
* Display buffers are copied to the dGPU.
* MadVR will run on the iGPU which is not optimal even if it works.

You can try faking a display by following these instructions.
I have a very similar setup (i7-2600, Radeon HD 6950, H67 board).
By faking the display and not using Virtu you get the advantage that MadVR will run on the dGPU (AMD) which is probably stronger (assuming you connected the display to it).
This trick might also enable other QuickSync enabled SW to run without a display connected. This is an unfortunate DirectX limitation - you can't enumerate a headless GPU. It was fixed in DX10 but DXVA (and Quicksync) relies on DX9.

I can try to reproduce your issue but I need more details:
* OS version (64 bit?)
* Virtu version
* Intel driver version.

Regarding display colors, my own HTPC is connected to a high quality plasma display via the iGPU. The colors are correct. It sounds like the output is in the range of 16-235 which will produce a milky image (blacks are grey, color is less saturated, image has low contrast). Try checking the values in graphics properties->Display->Monitor/TV setting
The TV should be set to full range (0-255). I'm assuming HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort output.

[karl_lillevold]

egur: thanks for the quick reply and fake display tips! Worked like a charm. Intel QuickSync with madVR now displaying on my main screen without any problems and looks great! Lucid Virtu was the problem. I was hoping to get rid of it completely, but for some reason even with the fake display, unless I enable it for dvdfab transcoding, it just sits there and never starts transcoding. It says QuickSync is available, but the transcoding pipeline hangs. My audio-less test clips also hang with this setup.

Wrt. colors on Intel: there are problems with the "Full" color range setting. It goes back to Limited by itself. I see numerous threads on avsforum discussing this problem. When I set it "Full", black-level test videos do indicate it is using the full range, at least temporarily, but I still get washed out colors, compared to ATI. Latest driver 8.15.10.2696. Win7 x64. Virtu 112. ASUS Z68 (maximus iv gene-z/gen3) MB. Connected to Onkyo TX-SR505 to Samsung DLP HDTV via HDMI.

[Avish]

Egur, I'm gonna try out the fake display trick, so could you please tell me what bios options I have to set for it to work?? My setup is same as yours except I have N460GTX Cyclone.

[egur]

The BIOS has to be set to enable the iGPU. If you installed Intel's graphics driver and it shows up in the device manager, than the BIOS setting are fine.
Some boards will disable the iGPU (in BIOS) when a dGPU is present.

Regarding the limited color range, I'll check around, my own TV is connected directly to the iGPU and my projector is connected though an Onkio 608 via an Nvidia dGPU on an older platform (core 2 quad).

Update:
I checked my driver setting (connected to Panasonic TV 50V20) and the settings were on 'limited'. Changing it to 'full' caused the colors to become washed out (i.e. RGB in 16-235 range). So in my case the labels are reversed.
I set the range to full and rebooted. It returned to 'Limited' like previously reported.
I'll report the 3 issues, this should be a simple fix.

I performed the tests using the desktop to eliminate renderer setting problems.

Does this also happen in IvyBridge?

[ryrynz]

It really is awesome that you're here to report these sorts of problems and get them resolved quickly for us Eric, thanks.

[Cyber-Mav]

is hardware acceleration for xvid and divx working yet?

[wanezhiling]

MPEG4 ASP works fine if you have a 300 series driver.

[karl_lillevold]

Originally Posted by karl_lillevold

egur: thanks for the quick reply and fake display tips! Worked like a charm. Intel QuickSync with madVR now displaying on my main screen without any problems and looks great!

The only and very annoying problem now is that whenever I switch away to another input on my AVR or connect from work via RDT, Windows loses the multiple desktop setup information, and I have to redo the fake display setup every time... There is a 40+ page topic on this general "KVM" switching problem on answers.microsoft.com. There is no good solution to this

Update: and not only does Win7 lose the multi desktop setup under the above conditions. Just switching from 60 to 23.976Hz with an ATI hotkey, which I frequently do, I have to re-extend the desktop. I don't have to go through the Detect stage, just choose extend desktop again. And then when I extend the desktop, it switches back to 60Hz. This is becoming an unrealistic solution.

[karl_lillevold]

Originally Posted by egur

Update:
I checked my driver setting (connected to Panasonic TV 50V20) and the settings were on 'limited'. Changing it to 'full' caused the colors to become washed out (i.e. RGB in 16-235 range). So in my case the labels are reversed.
I set the range to full and rebooted. It returned to 'Limited' like previously reported.
I'll report the 3 issues, this should be a simple fix.

I performed the tests using the desktop to eliminate renderer setting problems.

Does this also happen in IvyBridge?

Good findings. I will run some more tests as well. I also have an IvyBridge dev platform at work, provided to RealNetworks by Intel, but only computer monitors to connect it to.

[egur]

Originally Posted by karl_lillevold

The only and very annoying problem now is that whenever I switch away to another input on my AVR or connect from work via RDT, Windows loses the multiple desktop setup information, and I have to redo the fake display setup every time... There is a 40+ page topic on this general "KVM" switching problem on answers.microsoft.com. There is no good solution to this

Update: and not only does Win7 lose the multi desktop setup under the above conditions. Just switching from 60 to 23.976Hz with an ATI hotkey, which I frequently do, I have to re-extend the desktop. I don't have to go through the Detect stage, just choose extend desktop again. And then when I extend the desktop, it switches back to 60Hz. This is becoming an unrealistic solution.

I guess this hack isn't robust enough for setup. It's working for me on my dev platform, but I don't change resolutions or frame rate so I encounter these issues.
There's the option to use a VGA dummy (Google it).
I hope the driver or MSDK will support HW acceleration without a screen. I don't have any other information on the matter.

[egur]

Originally Posted by karl_lillevold

Wrt. colors on Intel: there are problems with the "Full" color range setting. It goes back to Limited by itself. I see numerous threads on avsforum discussing this problem. When I set it "Full", black-level test videos do indicate it is using the full range, at least temporarily, but I still get washed out colors, ...

What exactly did you do?
How did you test this?

FYI, blacker-than-black (Y < 16) pixels when converted to RGB in a PC system will become RGB(0,0,0). Same goes for whiter than white (Y > 235) they become RGB(255,255,255).

The only way to notice these out of range pixels is to use procamp (Contrast and brightness) while pixels are still in YUV colorspace. Raising the brightness will move real backs (Y =16) to a higher value, turning it to grey and the blacker-than-black pixels will stay black.

[Pat357]

Originally Posted by egur

What exactly did you do?
How did you test this?

FYI, blacker-than-black (Y < 16) pixels when converted to RGB in a PC system will become RGB(0,0,0). Same goes for whiter than white (Y > 235) they become RGB(255,255,255).

The only way to notice these out of range pixels is to use procamp (Contrast and brightness) while pixels are still in YUV colorspace. Raising the brightness will move real backs (Y =16) to a higher value, turning it to grey and the blacker-than-black pixels will stay black.

One can easily test the difference between full and limited with MadVR : IIRC, the short Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y will switch between TV (limited) and full (PC).
With output-levels to full, madVR will expand the YUV Y=16 -> Y=235 to resp. RGB(0,0,0) and RGB(255,255,255).
This also means that there is no BTB or WTW when using "full range" output levels in MadVR.
This is good, because video/movie content is almost always limited (only Y16 -> Y235).
The expansion done by MadVR makes also sure we optimally use the whole range : otherwise the regions Y=0-16 and Y=235-255 and there respective RGB ranges would get wasted, because the is no useful info in these ranges for video/movie content.
The above is only valid if ALL your interfaces (HDMI, AVR,TV,..) are all set to FULL range and no other level conversion is done after MadVR expanded the levels.

[malmsteen81]

@nevcairiel

hi, in future release can you add an auto mode for hardware deinterlacing?

thanks

Andrea

[wanezhiling]

LAV only has one hardware deinterlacing -- CUDA deinterlacing.

[malmsteen81]

i mean film/video mode

[karl_lillevold]

Originally Posted by egur

What exactly did you do?
How did you test this?

I realize now the clip I used was a TV levels test clip... Thanks for pointing out this error. I just now found the AVSHD-709 collection. In the "1-Black Clipping" video in this collection, all levels below 17 appeared black on my HDTV.

[egur]

To sum this up, the bug is that the full/limited labels are reversed and that the setting doesn't stick?
Anyone has anything to add (see a different problem)?

BTW, since PCs output RGB (desktop is always RGB), it's always better to do the calibration without video - just a bitmap pattern. This eliminates bad settings in the renderer/player.

[Leapo]

Running into a pretty major issue with fallback detection when using LAV with Windows Media Center.

If I put LAV Video into DXVA (copy-back) mode, and run Windows Media Center in a window, everything works perfectly. LAV uses DXVA to decode the video. If I fullscreen Windows Media Center while the video is already playing, it continues to use hardware acceleration without a problem.

Now, here's where it gets weird. If I start Windows Media Center, fullscreen the window first, THEN start the same video, LAV Video immediately falls back to software decoding. The only difference is that the Media Center window was already fullscreen when I clicked "play".

Any chance you could look into this? LAV would finally make the AMD graphics card in my media center usable for hardware accelerated decoding if this worked correctly!

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by egur

BTW, since PCs output RGB (desktop is always RGB), it's always better to do the calibration without video - just a bitmap pattern. This eliminates bad settings in the renderer/player.

If your HTPC is the main source for the TV, you should calibrate for your final video playback chain.
Of course making sure its configured properly is the first step.

[nevcairiel]

Originally Posted by Leapo

Any chance you could look into this? LAV would finally make the AMD graphics card in my media center usable for hardware accelerated decoding if this worked correctly!

Use DXVA Native.
While in theory DXVA-CB could be made to work, it would only work if LAV Video is connected directly to the renderer itself, not allowing post-processing in any case, so DXVA-CB does not offer any advantages over DXVA native anymore.
Thats the limitations the Exclusive mode WMC runs under places on you, can only use DXVA if you get direct contact with the renderer.