Freeware Media Player(s) and HD Playback Support

[DVD Maniac]

Not having ventured into the world of freeware players for sometime i'm finding it very confusing to locate any definitive answer as to which of (the many) here have Blu Ray / HD DVD playback support from either Optical Disk or HDD Folder?

Im fed up with playing the upgrade game with the commercial options and finding functionality being removed :devil:

Trawling the threads is not proving useful so maybe someone could reply with some guidance which would be much appreciated. I'm running Vista x64 with a 9800 Nvidia card and a dual core AMD processor if that influences the choices.

Thanks

[Turtleggjp]

I don't think any freeware tools will playback the entire disc structure yet. Your best bet is to use tools such as eac3to, tsmuxer, tsremux, and mkvmerge to process the main movie into a single .mkv or .m2ts file that can then be played on something like Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which has support for hardware acceleration (H.264 only though for your video card, VC-1 will have to be done in software).

[Jong]

VC-1 will have to be done in software.Not quite right. Owners of ATI GPUs get VC-1 hardware acceleration too.

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/DXVASupport.html

[NanoBot]

NVidias onboard GPUs 9300 and 9400 ( only the onboard version, not the version used on discrete graphic cards ) are also able to fully decode VC.1 in hardware, using the internal VC.1 decoder of MPC HC. Nevertheless, the internal decoder is ( not yet ) able to decode interlaced VC.1 content, it only works with progressive VC.1 streams.

[Turtleggjp]

Not quite right. Owners of ATI GPUs get VC-1 hardware acceleration too.

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/DXVASupport.html

I don't think any freeware tools will playback the entire disc structure yet. Your best bet is to use tools such as eac3to, tsmuxer, tsremux, and mkvmerge to process the main movie into a single .mkv or .m2ts file that can then be played on something like Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which has support for hardware acceleration (H.264 only though for your video card, VC-1 will have to be done in software).

I was refering to his stated GeForce 9800 card, which as far as I know does not have full VC-1 acceleration. That's why I went with a GeForce 9400 motherboard for my HTPC. Aside from its inability to de-interlace 1080i content 100% perfectly without help from my GeForce 8500 card, I found it to be the better choice for such a setup. It also doesn't suffer from the blurring bug that the Radeon cards seem to have.

[Jong]

Fair enough!

[Sion]

I'm confused.
This article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_PureVideo
States that VC-1 and h.264 support (albeit limited) was available as far back as the 6600gt gpu's from Nvidia.

[Jong]

MPC-HC and the MPC Video Decoder specifically can only support DXVA in bitstreaming mode, i.e. where full decoding is done by the GPU. It cannot utilise the partial H.264 HA implementations in earlier GPUs and still in Nvidia GPUs for VC-1.