madVR - high quality video renderer (GPU assisted)

[Mark_A_W]

Madshi, if you are out there...

I reinstalled Vista on my PC over the weekend.

And the occasional glitch in playback I was getting is gone (it wasn't a madVR thing, it happened in all players, all setups).


I've now watched two complete movies, without the slightest jump/jerk/stutter/nothing. Perfectly smooth, for hours on end.


My setup is Reclock and madVR in Zoomplayer, with Ffdshow for the video decoder (well, running wmv9 inside ffdshow for VC-1), and madFLAC feeding Ffdshow Audio. Display is a secondary monitor running 1920*1080 interlaced at 96hz (48hz interlaced to Powerstrip).


I do have stability issues when resizing the window, or sometimes on starting play, or restarting play. But as far as I am concerned the smooth playback features work fine.



However, it took a while to come good. After installation, and after Reclock settled down, I was still getting jerky playback. After a while, and a few restarts of Zoom Player it came good....really good. Spookily smooth.

I tried Win7, but had tearing and jerkiness with a similar setup (identical except I was running 1080p 48hz as I couldn't get interlacing to work on Win7).


So thank you for you efforts so far, this is the smoothest playback I have ever seen from a PC. And it does seem to me that Vista32 is still the path of least resistance for a HTPC.

Mark

Edit: I should add that I trimmed Vista down after installation. Turned off lots of services, the UAC, indexing, error reporting...lotsa crap.

[Jong]

This is good to hear, but IMO judder on start/seek is just not acceptable. Not a criticism of MadVR, I know smoothness is still work in progress. But any solution that has this issue just does not work for any system that is used by non HTPC techheads! or anyone who wants what should be a "normal" click and play solution.

[leeperry]

I trimmed Vista down after installation. Turned off lots of services, the UAC, indexing, error reporting...lotsa crap.
how many processes? I can reach <20 on XP, but <30 on Vista seems impossible to achieve :o

[Mark_A_W]

This is good to hear, but IMO judder on start/seek is just not acceptable. Not a criticism of MadVR, I know smoothness is still work in progress. But any solution that has this issue just does not work for any system that is used by non HTPC techheads! or anyone who wants what should be a "normal" click and play solution.


What startup/seek judder?

It's perfect I tell ya.


The stability issues I mentioned are literally stability issue....madVR crashes out quite a lot. But as madshi mentions buggy about 10 times in the description for v0.10, that is to be expected.

[Mark_A_W]

how many processes? I can reach <20 on XP, but <30 on Vista seems impossible to achieve :o

Umm...I have 62 services.

I followed the Black Viper "Safe" settings. Turned off about 10 I guess.

And turned of the UAC, Indexing and events notification.

Less than 30? You're brave.

[lych_necross]

You followed advice from Black Viper? You are braver than I am. In general, it is best not to turn of services. Most of them are idle anyways and turning some of them off can cause problems.

[leeperry]

In general, it is best not to turn of services. Most of them are idle anyways
they can also decide to do funky stuff while you're in the middle of a movie. it's usually good to move them to single cores in low priority, and put your player in high.
and of course they use resources, never a good thing on a HTPC imho.
Umm...I have 62 services.
well, you can reach 30, so get going :p

[Jong]

The stability issues I mentioned are literally stability issue....madVR crashes out quite a lot. Ah Ok. I misunderstood. Great news.

[Thunderbolt8]

does anyone know how madvr (currently) performs with 1080p .mkv files (x264 encodes (multithreaded); h264 & vc-1 remuxes) on nvidia's integrated graphic chips 9400 and 8300, when using ffdshow and also when (down)scaling is involved?

[ryrynz]

Try it and see?

[Thunderbolt8]

lol, I dont have these cards/chips, why else would I be asking -.-

[ryrynz]

There are some people out there that are pretty damn lazy :p

[6233638]

does anyone know how madvr (currently) performs with 1080p .mkv files (x264 encodes (multithreaded); h264 & vc-1 remuxes) on nvidia's integrated graphic chips 9400 and 8300, when using ffdshow and also when (down)scaling is involved?
I can play back 1080p bluray content on my 9400 with the CPU doing all the decoding (running at 3.7GHz to ensure smooth playback though) and it's absolutely perfect if I don't use a 3D LUT. With a 3D LUT it's usually ok, but it sometimes stutters.

I can play back PAL DVD at 24fps (reclock) upscaled to 1080p using Mitchell-Netravali without any issues as well.

I really doubt the 9400 could cope with downscaling 1080p content though. At least in the 0.10 release.



Things have been pretty quiet here lately, any word on a new version of madVR? There's still quite a few issues with 0.10

[Thunderbolt8]

guess madshi's taking a break atm :D

whats actually the difference between having a 3D LUT file and not? and does madVR not create it automatically ?

[6233638]

guess madshi's taking a break atm :D

whats actually the difference between having a 3D LUT file and not? and does madVR not create it automatically ?
I think it only matters if you're doing custom calibration rather than using the standard HD/SD colour points.

[73ChargerFan]

thunderbolt - search to get the answer from the horse's mouth, but iirc .10 has shader code to do the color space conversion, which is what 3D LUT file does. But 3D LUT is more powerful and can correct for more things, including custom screen calibrations. This is all a work in progress.

[Thunderbolt8]

k, thanks!

[6233638]

Having problems with 0.10 now. Things used to be fine, almost perfect playback but now every couple of minutes the framerate drops badly for about 4-5 seconds.

Can't seem to bring up the OSD anymore either.

[kostik]

Having problems with 0.10 now. Things used to be fine, almost perfect playback but now every couple of minutes the framerate drops badly for about 4-5 seconds.

Can't seem to bring up the OSD anymore either.


have a same problem. Nothing to do but to wait for Madshi to continue his work on madvr, hopefully soon :)

[flanger216]

Having problems with 0.10 now. Things used to be fine, almost perfect playback but now every couple of minutes the framerate drops badly for about 4-5 seconds.

Can't seem to bring up the OSD anymore either.

Same on my end. I find it helps to check the box for 'disable anti-tearing fix.'

[Mark_A_W]

Madshi, if you are out there...

I reinstalled Vista on my PC over the weekend.

And the occasional glitch in playback I was getting is gone (it wasn't a madVR thing, it happened in all players, all setups).


I've now watched two complete movies, without the slightest jump/jerk/stutter/nothing. Perfectly smooth, for hours on end.


My setup is Reclock and madVR in Zoomplayer, with Ffdshow for the video decoder (well, running wmv9 inside ffdshow for VC-1), and madFLAC feeding Ffdshow Audio. Display is a secondary monitor running 1920*1080 interlaced at 96hz (48hz interlaced to Powerstrip).


I do have stability issues when resizing the window, or sometimes on starting play, or restarting play. But as far as I am concerned the smooth playback features work fine.



However, it took a while to come good. After installation, and after Reclock settled down, I was still getting jerky playback. After a while, and a few restarts of Zoom Player it came good....really good. Spookily smooth.

I tried Win7, but had tearing and jerkiness with a similar setup (identical except I was running 1080p 48hz as I couldn't get interlacing to work on Win7).


So thank you for you efforts so far, this is the smoothest playback I have ever seen from a PC. And it does seem to me that Vista32 is still the path of least resistance for a HTPC.

Mark

Edit: I should add that I trimmed Vista down after installation. Turned off lots of services, the UAC, indexing, error reporting...lotsa crap.


Some more feedback.

I've now watched numerous movies with madVR 0.10 and Reclock (active) and playback at 96hz is basically perfect.

I've compared to MPC-HC EVR custom (Beliyaal) with and without Reclock active, and with MPC + Gothplayer mods (reclock slaved).

I get the best smoothness with madVR + Reclock active.


I also watched a movie with madVR and Reclock slaved, and it was very, very good, but I did see one or two little jumps.

And somehow, with Reclock active it just "feel" smoother (where do we get these placebos?).

I can't hear a difference with Reclock active or slaved - and I have a pretty reasonable audio system (DIY fully active Focal driver system).

Reclock and madVR seem like a match made in heaven to me. I'd prefer if we can get non-resampled audio, but like I said, I can't hear it.

[kostik]

madvr 0.10+reclock and d3doverride enabled with mpc hc works perfectly smooth also.

[3ngel]

I would like to signal that MadVR doesn't work with INTEL GMA950 (Asus EEEPC 1000H) graphic chipset + MPC.

Hope this will be fixed, i would gladly reduce the cpu consuming a bit by using the GPU :)

Thanks

[flanger216]

Wouldn't count on it... the GMA950 is about as low-end as desktop graphics gets.

[3ngel]

But as far as i can see from Everest report, it does support almost every DirectX function.

[thuan]

Indeed, but slowly. As far as my card which is a 9500GT goes, it's also good enough to run this filter in every situation. So don't expect your card has a chance, at least not any time soon.

EDIT: Part of why it's slow is because it doesn't have vertex shader IIRC, that is "offload" to the CPU which is not optimized for the task.

[3ngel]

Mmm i see, but aren't the "Pixel" shaders used to offload the task in situation like a video renderer?

In this case the supported version on the (embedded) GMA950 is the 2.0.

At this point it's for personal culture too i would like to better know :)

I think that on situations like netbooks where every percentage of CPU it's important, offload is an even more useful feature.

[Hypernova]

I would say don't get your hope too high. My card was ATi HD2600 Pro and it can barely manage to give me a "smooth" playback with any resizer beyond bilinear. You are right that the chip support the functions, but it's too slow for madVR. And for what I see, madshi seems to be interested in bringing the fastest card to its knee with some more benefits than make the old one works with compromise.

[St Devious]

I would say don't get your hope too high. My card was ATi HD2600 Pro and it can barely manage to give me a "smooth" playback with any resizer beyond bilinear. You are right that the chip support the functions, but it's too slow for madVR. And for what I see, madshi seems to be interested in bringing the fastest card to its knee with some more benefits than make the old one works with compromise.

wait, how does this renderer use so much of GPU ? and how does this benefit ouput ?

[nurbs]

Look at the first post.

[DigitalLF]

nurbs: what are you talking about? theres no update?

"Last edited by madshi; 16th May 2009 at 23:51."

[tetsuox]

@St. Devious, look at the output comparisons on the first page.

[DigitalLF]

hahaha my bad.. :P i didn't get that nurbs answered "St. Devious"

[St Devious]

@St. Devious, look at the output comparisons on the first page.

those are just patterns. anybody did a image comparison with real videos ?

[Hypernova]

those are just patterns. anybody did a image comparison with real videos ?

I did with anime banding. Others also did movies. You have to go look back in this thread.

[Thunderbolt8]

does anyone know why most x264 encodes of movies flying around the web do not work with madVR, while basically all BD sources do (apart from some interlaced 30fps vc-1 stuff or something like that)? has it something to do with non norm compliant number of ref frames & encoding specs or anything like that?

[ryrynz]

That would be due to your decoder. Cuda is limited in the amount of reference frames it can process, so if your using Coreavc that's your problem right there.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

That would be due to your decoder. Cuda is limited in the amount of reference frames it can process, so if your using Coreavc that's your problem right there.

That's not true. CoreAVC has no such limitation. It works just fine here with here with 1080p content and 16 ref frames. It just doesn't use CUDA (falls back to software mode) for that clip.

Anyway, if MadVR doesn't work with certain x264-encoded clips, that may be because the decoder doesn't deliver YV12 data -or- because the resolution of the video isn't mod16.

(BD sources are required to be mod16 by definition, but it's certainly not guaranteed for arbitrary clips "flying around the web")

[Nil Einne]

I've an ATI HD4850 so ... Do I've to buy a q6600 to have a perfect fluidity with H264 and ffdshow?

Or, in the next future, the ATI card will give us a similar solution like nvidia's cuda?

It's my understanding from what the CoreCodec people (who make CoreAVC) having been saying is that OpenCL will support this sort of thing and it should support it on ATI. This should be coming in CoreAVC 2.0 (which will be coming after CorePlayer 2.0). However ATI don't yet have OpenCL drivers (for Windows at least) even though they've promised to release them so it may be a while yet.

One thing I'm still not sure of is whether there are any plans to support the hardware deinterlacing features (pixel adaptive/vector adaptive) via OpenCL. Is CoreAVC currently capable of this with CUDA?

[ryrynz]

That's not true. CoreAVC has no such limitation. It works just fine here with here with 1080p content and 16 ref frames. It just doesn't use CUDA (falls back to software mode) for that clip.

Anyway, if MadVR doesn't work with certain x264-encoded clips, that may be because the decoder doesn't deliver YV12 data -or- because the resolution of the video isn't mod16.

(BD sources are required to be mod16 by definition, but it's certainly not guaranteed for arbitrary clips "flying around the web")

I didn't state that Coreavc has a limitation, just that Cuda does.
Obviously that isn't the issue and was just a guess, as I know the format of the video should play no part in whether an image is displayed by the renderer.
Regardless of the assumption, my first statement is correct.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I didn't state that Coreavc has a limitation, just that Cuda does.
Obviously that isn't the issue and was just a guess, as I know the format of the video should play no part in whether an image is displayed by the renderer.
Regardless of the assumption, my first statement is correct.

No, the statement is not correct. CUDA itself doesn't have any such limitations! In fact CUDA kernels can access the complete device memory (1024 MB or even more on modern graphics cards), which is more than enough to store 16 reference frames in 1080p resolution. However most (all?) applications that pretend to use "CUDA" accelerated decoding actually do not implement their own H.264 decoder in CUDA. Instead they simply access the graphic card's "built-in" H.264 decoder through the CUDA interface. And that decoder isn't related to CUDA computing at all! It's a completely separate chip (e.g. VP2) on the graphics board. And since the decoder on that chip is "hardwired", there are inherent limitations, such as a limited MaxDPB size (which limits the number of ref frames that can be supported).

[ryrynz]

That's interesting to know thanks for the info, perhaps I should have been clearer but my first statement was "That would be due to your decoder"
which as you said was not either outputting mod16 or YV12 and is obviously the cause.

[Thunderbolt8]

theres a problem with madVR not displaying 4:3 (mpeg2, 1080i, .ts & mpc-hc) movies correctly (at least on my 5:4 screen). black bars get eliminated and the image is therefore stretched vertically to fill the area where the black bars used to be at top and bottom, resulting in a wrong AR. everything's too slim. occurs in both, window mode and fullscreen.

[Anima123]

There's a bug madVR with mplayerc-hc that bother me. When pause a file, then full-screen the playback, then play, the player will get nothing but black. mplayerc-hc has to be killed by task manager to restart.

[Matthias Hutter]

Hi @all,

@Anima123:

I've done some testing: Actually, if playback is paused and restarted with another setting (time, resolution) the player hangs up and needs to be killed via the taskmanager - at least on my PC.
Another bug is that luma upres is resetted to bicubic 50 every time. But I think others already mentioned that.
Besides that I noticed that image parts with strong color saturation get blacked out with the default Bradford color transform on my wide gammut monitor.

/Edit: Output-Primaries[x,y]: 0.667 0.333 0.159 0.704 0.150 0.051 0.333 0.347

Regards, Matt

[yesgrey]

Besides that I noticed that image parts with strong color saturation get blacked out with the default Bradford color transform on my wide gammut monitor.
There is no defaults in cr3dlut, so, please let me know what have you used. Can you also post an image of what's happenning?

[Thunderbolt8]

There is no defaults in cr3dlut, so, please let me know what have you used. Can you also post an image of what's happenning?
I haven't checkmarked the 3dlut option, is this what you mean?

can make screenshot tomorrow evening.

[yesgrey]

I haven't checkmarked the 3dlut option, is this what you mean?
If you haven't checkmarked the 3dlut option, then you're not using the 3dlut...;)
The problem should come from other thing...
Please post also the cr3dlut version that you are using.

[Thunderbolt8]

I haven't checkmarked the 3dlut option, is this what you mean?

can make screenshot tomorrow evening.

here they are:

mpc & madvr window

http://thumbnails18.imagebam.com/4314/f461cf43134957.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/f461cf43134957)


mpc & madvr fullscreen

http://thumbnails18.imagebam.com/4314/8c84df43134958.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/8c84df43134958)


VLC

http://thumbnails18.imagebam.com/4314/d3acf543134959.gif (http://www.imagebam.com/image/d3acf543134959)

Please post also the cr3dlut version that you are using.
how can I find that out, which of the files do I have to check how?

[73ChargerFan]

I hope madshi has time to read this thread occasionally, to log these bug reports.
Have you switched to a different render, like overlay?

Or MPC could be at fault for the squeezing of your video. When mpc-hc does something really bad like this, I delete the registry key (instructions at mpc-hc wiki) to reset the software.

Also, for immediate enjoyment, you can widen the aspect ratio using mpc-hc command "num pad 6".