Media Player Classic for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray

[sarah99]

MPC keeps merits in its own part of the windows registry.
PowerDVD blocks most of its filters from use by other apps.

[slaman]

Originally Posted by sarah99

MPC keeps merits in its own part of the windows registry.
PowerDVD blocks most of its filters from use by other apps.

I see - so my attempts to have two MPC's - one for HD DVD playback and one for regular playback... is a non-starter since they most likely share registry entries...

PowerDVD 7.3 filters appear under the "External Filters" section in MPC as registered... I can add them and set merits for them. I guess it's just figuring out which ones are correct.

My work-around is to just use PowerDVD for HD content :/

[Inventive Software]

Didn't MPC at one point store it's settings in an .ini file?

EDIT: It does. Try that and see whether multiple MPCs work.

[Leak]

Originally Posted by slaman

I see - so my attempts to have two MPC's - one for HD DVD playback and one for regular playback... is a non-starter since they most likely share registry entries...

Not if you check "Player > Other > Store settings to .ini file" in both - of course, you'll only be able to associate one of them with each filetype, but it should work; it does for me, at least.

np: Nightcats - Inside (Kompakt Total 8 (Disc 1))

[slaman]

Cyberlink PowerDVD consistently reboots my computer when I try to play an HD DVD, looks like I'm back to using MPC.

Any ideas of what needs to happen to support HD DVD navigation in MPC (like DVD navigation?)

[slaman]

I have a Core2 Duo 2.13GHz CPU overclocked to 3.2GHz and still get occassional bumps and skips.

Is that expected while playing back an HD DVD?

How powerful a system do you need?

[slaman]

CPU usage is at maximum 52% during the "stutter" - it looks like a game looks when VSYNC isn't on...

I'm not sure why I'm getting the stutters - maybe it's not CPU related and instead just a frequency thing?

When I right-click during playback, I get the following filters:

Video Mixing Render 9
AC3Filter (to enable SPDIF throughput)
WMV Decoder DMO

ideas?

[slaman]

Ok, so I've figured out a few things... MPC playback of HD DVD causes stutters in a few scenes, whereas PowerDVD doesn't...

I wonder why?

PowerDVD resets my computer without fail after 30 seconds, so I can't use it to watch my HD DVDs!

[sarah99]

Originally Posted by slaman

PowerDVD 7.3 filters appear under the "External Filters" section in MPC as registered... I can add them and set merits for them. I guess it's just figuring out which ones are correct.

You can see them, you can select them, buy they don't work.

Originally Posted by slaman

I have a Core2 Duo 2.13GHz CPU overclocked to 3.2GHz and still get occassional bumps and skips.

Is that expected while playing back an HD DVD?

I have a core2duo e4300 running at 1.8GHz and it can play all HD-DVDs at about 60-80% CPU, your problem is elsewhere (anti-virus software?)

"Haali media splitter (AR)" & "Sonic Cinemaster Audio Decoder" should be in your list of filters!

[slaman]

Originally Posted by sarah99

You can see them, you can select them, buy they don't work.



I have a core2duo e4300 running at 1.8GHz and it can play all HD-DVDs at about 60-80% CPU, your problem is elsewhere (anti-virus software?)

"Haali media splitter (AR)" & "Sonic Cinemaster Audio Decoder" should be in your list of filters!

I'll shutdown the AV software and see if that helps anything... I defragged my HD yesterday as well to see if it was a disk access problem.

Haali media splitter (AR) doesn't appear explicitly on the list, but the icon appears in the tray, so I know it's being used.

Finally, the only reason I use AC3 Filter over Sonic Audio decoder is because I don't know how to enable SPDIF throughput... all my DTS gets converted to Stereo

[sarah99]

You are using the wrong Haali filter, you should use the (AR) version, both would be in your external filter list.
Using the non (AR) version, that only appears in the tray, can cause crashes if you try to change audio tracks from the tray.

But I suspect the AC3 Filter is causing the problem (although I can't be entirely sure as I use 6 channel analogue audio outputs so I can listen to DD+). Very few HD-DVDs have a DTS audio track so you can only have a very limited selection of HD-DVD.

To use internal filters to send to SPDIF, internal filters, transform filters, double click on DTS .... but it won't do DD+ which is what HD-DVD uses most of the time.

[slaman]

Originally Posted by sarah99

You are using the wrong Haali filter, you should use the (AR) version, both would be in your external filter list.
Using the non (AR) version, that only appears in the tray, can cause crashes if you try to change audio tracks from the tray.

But I suspect the AC3 Filter is causing the problem (although I can't be entirely sure as I use 6 channel analogue audio outputs so I can listen to DD+). Very few HD-DVDs have a DTS audio track so you can only have a very limited selection of HD-DVD.

To use internal filters to send to SPDIF, internal filters, transform filters, double click on DTS .... but it won't do DD+ which is what HD-DVD uses most of the time.

Haali Media Splitter (AR) is in my external filter list, and I've even added Haali Media Splitter to the list as blocked... when I playback, it still only appears as the icon. Don't think this is the problem though, because in your images (the first one) it doesn't appear either.

As for AC3 Filter, I have tried both ffdshow audio decoder and the sonic decoder - both have the stutter...

my only guess is the source - I need to test it out on another source file - will have to do that once I get one.

[Demi9OD]

Is there any way to do light post processing on HD/Blu Ray with FFDShow? Every time I have it process the raw frames from wmv9 or decode itself, the framerate is weird and I get large jumps and skips.

[amdxp]

I have installed Nvidia Purevideo decoder and i think that i have now not so good the quality in hddvd movies. What you think guys? Do i need that Nvidia purevideo to watch hd movies?

[slaman]

Originally Posted by amdxp

I have installed Nvidia Purevideo decoder and i think that i have now not so good the quality in hddvd movies. What you think guys? Do i need that Nvidia purevideo to watch hd movies?

I don't think that PureVideo can decode HD, only SD... I could be wrong though.

[sarah99]

PureVideo only works when playing Blu-Ray MPEG2 (as far as I know)

[IanD]

Originally Posted by slaman

As for AC3 Filter, I have tried both ffdshow audio decoder and the sonic decoder - both have the stutter...

my only guess is the source - I need to test it out on another source file - will have to do that once I get one.

I found enabling overlay in MPC to be the smoothest for playback: VMR7/9 renderless caused a very stuttery effect for me and VMR7/9 used more CPU and was not quite as smooth.

The other interesting effect I noticed is that I use a C2D CPU and whilst the CPU loads on the cores look the same on the level meter, the individual core graphs of load show one core is about 3 times the other. Consequently, whilst overall load is showing say 50%, one of the cores is actually around 80%: this could mean that one core may be overloaded even though the average load seems to be quite low. I'm not sure why the cores are unevenly loaded, unless WMV9 decoder only uses 1 core and the audio decoder the other. May be an explanation for why you see stuttery results.

[foxyshadis]

It's just the way Windows handles heavy loads when you have lots of threads/processes, the main pegged thread will jump from core to core. The only useful number is the aggregate %. And yes, the WMV9 decoder is single-threaded, though that's supposed to change sometime.

[IanD]

Originally Posted by Demi9OD

Is there any way to do light post processing on HD/Blu Ray with FFDShow? Every time I have it process the raw frames from wmv9 or decode itself, the framerate is weird and I get large jumps and skips.

I managed to do it by manually adding the ffdshow raw filter in graphedit after the WMV9 decoder filter, but I didn't notice any jumps or skips. Maybe it can be added as part of the MPC preferred filter chain.

I was actually adding noise to the Last Starfighter (seems to improve the plasticky look due to excessive NR), although I haven't watched much of it.

I did notice it increased the CPU load by a fair amount, so maybe you are running into CPU overload situations when adding post processing.

[IanD]

Originally Posted by foxyshadis

It's just the way Windows handles heavy loads when you have lots of threads/processes, the main pegged thread will jump from core to core. The only useful number is the aggregate %. And yes, the WMV9 decoder is single-threaded, though that's supposed to change sometime.

With the new 163.71 WHQL Nvidia drivers, if I activate WMV dxva using the WMV Powertoy, the WMV9 decoder gets accelerated and now both cores read the same low level (8500GT).

However, I get system lockup and instability after a short while and a blue horizontal bar in the MPC window at the bottom (very similar to the grey bar when decoding 1088 versus 1080 mpeg2 material that I recall from ages ago).

Oh well, it's some progress, but a multi-threaded WMV9 decoder would be good: one of the cores is hardly getting used whilst the other is getting dangerously close to very little headroom.