Avivo

[Shakey_Jake33]

Not quite sure where to put this tbh, but since I'm using MPC, I'll put it here.

Just ordered a X1600 Pro AGP, it has AVIVO - yay, H.264, WMV and Mpeg2 hardware acceleration I gather.

Now... how do I use this? I gather I'm going to need a codec capable of GPU acceleration. With Nvidia's competing product PureVideo, they actually have a codec for download on their page, no-go with AVIVO.

Could someone point me towards AVIVO-compatible codecs, and how to confugure MPC to be compatible?

Thanks! Never used this before...

[Sulik]

The video converter is in the basic view of the Catalyst Control Center.

[hrlslcbr]

AFAIK any decoder that uses DXVA should work and enable avivo (the decoding part anyway). You can try the intervideo/cyberlink/nvidia decoders. They all have DXVA mode.

[Shakey_Jake33]

Hmm. Just found out it'll accelerate DivX/Mpeg4 AVS too. Currently use ffdshow for that, does ffdshow support DXVA?

I assume I must switch MPC to VMR9 too?

[CruNcher]

ffdshow has no DXVA support yet and most probably never will have any

[hrlslcbr]

I assume I must switch MPC to VMR9 too?
Not really. You can use the 'old' overlay mixer, VMR 7/9 or Haali's renderer.

[Shakey_Jake33]

Not really. You can use the 'old' overlay mixer, VMR 7/9 or Haali's renderer.
Cool.

Is there a known DivX/XviD decoder that supports DXVA then? (Assuming Cyberlink PowerDVD only does Mpeg2, and the Cyberlink H.264 decoder only does H.264, correct me if I'm wrong).

Not that it's really necessary with todays spec PC's to GPU accelerate it, I just wish to test out the AVIVO functions of the card.

[Turtleggjp]

I too have been trying to get ATi's AVIVO to accelerate a clip I made with X264. The clip is from an HD source, and is 1920x1080 @24fps (progressive) so it is too much for my Athlon64 X2 4600+ system to handle. In my main system, I have a Radeon X800XL, which accelerates HD MPEG2 beautifully, but since it is from before the X1XXX cards, I don't expect it to accelerate H.264 content. However, I bought a X1300 card a while ago for a computer at work, and now I have bought another one for a HTPC and I was hoping to get it to accelerate playback of these HD H.264 files. I have Cyberlink's PowerDVD7, which allows me to play the clips, but I cannot get it to accelerate the decoding with my video card. Smaller (DVD sized) clips play just fine, and I am able to make it accelerate some of my HD MPEG2 clips as well. However it still refuses to help with the big H.264 files.

I have been reading a lot from ATi, Cyberlink, and now Sapphire too (makers of my X1300 cards), and some places seem to suggest that I need at least an X1600 series card to accelerate H.264, while others say that all X1XXX cards can do it. I like these X1300 cards that I have because they don't have fans, only a heatsink, so I would like to stay with one for my HTPC. If I have to upgrade to an X1600 series to get H.264 acceleration, I guess I will, but I don't want to end up in the same situation. Also, the computer I've been testing this on is running Windows 2000, not Windows XP. Could that have something to do with it? Thanks.

Matt

[KoD]

h264 acceleration depends on how powerful your video card is. With a low end x1300 don't expect much.

h264 acceleration is only available when using a decoder like those from cyberlink powerdvd (deluxe version), or nero ultra. Although support was planned for intervideo windvd, I don't know if it has been implemented yet. Win2000 or WinXP should not matter, but who knows... I should also say that Cyberlink's decoder (in fact, not developed by them) has limited abilities, sometimes it does not do deblocking of video or simply can't decode a h264 stream when certain options were used during encoding. Also, its software rendering mode (when no hardware acceleration is used) is slow as a snail.

DXVA is irrelevant for h264 acceleration. H264 hardware acceleration is done through a proprietary graphic card api in both cases: nvidia and ati.

If you want to know more about h264 acceleration when using AVIVO, this is a good article: Beyond3D (http://www.beyond3d.com/previews/ati/avivo/).

[Turtleggjp]

Thanks for that article, even though it made me much less optimistic about H.264 acceleration with AVIVO.

I recently built a computer at work that had a Sempron (754) 1.8GHz CPU and a Radeon 9250 AGP card. When I saw that it was able to accelerate MPEG2 1080i clips just as well as my X800XL and Athlon64 (939) 2.2GHz at home, I was hoping that similar acceleration would be there with the X1000 series cards for H.264. According to that article though, they said that the X1900 card reduced the CPU usage by only 6%. My system chokes on 1080i MPEG2 content with de-interlacing turned on, but with the hardware acceleration, it just cruises at about 20% CPU usage and looks beautiful. Now THAT'S some hardware acceleration! If a lowly card like a Radeon 9250 (cost me less than $40) can do that, I was hoping that the X1300 could do that too with H.264 content. With a new TV season starting, I was going to look into using X264 to encode and archive some TV shows at full HD resolution. However due to a lack of decoding power out there, it looks like I'll be stuck using XviD for a while.

Matt

[foxyshadis]

They tested on Quicktime, which is junk. And their encoder testing methodology is completely worthless; afaik even the latest drivers have zero on-gpu encoding, it's still 100% cpu based, and still fast only because of terrible quality. So I have no idea how much to trust the article. If they'd compared with cyberlink, that'd be different.

[chros]

Have you tried the CoreAVC decoder? (This is the fastest software decoder.)

Because I'm planning to upgrade the CPU from 3GHz Athlon64 to 3.8 Ghz Athlon X2. Is it worth it?
Now the 720p QuickTime content is working flowlessly, and the 1080p is almost !
Try the 1080p teaser from:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/da_vinci_code/hd/

But, as foxyshadis said, it's only QT ... :)

[Turtleggjp]

Have you tried the CoreAVC decoder? (This is the fastest software decoder.)


Just tried it on my main system (Athlon64 X2 4600, Radeon X800XL). On my 1920x1080p test clip that I made with X264 it only hit 20% - 30%! Pretty Nice! Now I'll have to see how well it does on the Sempron 1.6GHz I have in my upcoming HTPC. The only thing I'm missing now is a way to open these X264 AVI files in VirtualDub. I guess that will come with time. At least now I can do some experimenting with X264 and get the quality to where I like it.

Because I'm planning to upgrade the CPU from 3GHz Athlon64 to 3.8 Ghz Athlon X2. Is it worth it?


I assume you mean from an Athlon64 3000+ to an Athlon64 X2 3800+ (those are not clock speeds btw). I paid about $560 for my X2 4600 earlier this year, and it is less than half that price now. If you already have a 939 board for your current CPU, and X2 would be a nice upgrade. I'd suggest you try to at least match your current CPU in terms of clock speed and cache, so that single threaded apps won't suffer a slowdown.

One more question. Since things on the AVIVO front don't look too promising, how well do NVIDIA's cards accelerate H.264? For about $150 I can get a 7600GT which is the minimum card that Cyberlink recommends for H.264 Acceleration. Would I have better luck going this route?

Matt