Problems with MPC-HC and Broadcom Crystal HD and renderers other than overlay

[Veazer]

I just added a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder to my Dell Mini 9 (BCM970015, http://www.logicsupply.com/products/bcm970015). I'm really impressed by the image quality and low CPU use, so far I like it much better than the hardware decoding on my other laptop using an intel GMA4500MHD.

The problem is I am unable to use any renderer other than overlay without getting errors. I would like to use EVR Custom Presenter or EVR Sync renderers, though I really don't know much about EVR Sync as I just noticed it on the latest MPC-HC.

If I use EVR CP, I get the following error:

Error creating EVR Custom renderer (Window title)
CreateDevice failed
DX9AllocatorPresenter failed

D3DERR_INVALIDCALL

With EVR Sync, I get this error:

Error creating EVR Sync (Window Title)
0x80004005 SyncAP failed

0x80004005

Haali renderer only gives a black screen, overlay works fine without errors. Haven't messed around with VMR7/9 renderers.

I've tried using the custom builds of MPC-HC from http://www.ostrogothia.com/?page_id=1213, same problem.

Any tips are welcome! Thanks.

Specs:
Dell Mini 9 w/ Intel GMA 950 video
Broadcom Crystal HD BCM 970015 decoder
WinXP SP3 with DX9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Media Player Classic HC 1.4.2499.0

[edigee]

AFAIK only EVR(simple) works in XP (as long as you have net framework 3.0 or higher installed), not EVR Custom/Sync. You might give a try to VMR9/7 though.

[namaiki]

For Windows XP, you are going to need to use either Overlay or VMR9 as far as I know.

[Hagbard23]

For Windows XP, you are going to need to use either Overlay or VMR9 as far as I know.
That is quite right - EVR is intended for VISTA and above only - in Fact EVR is very similar to VMR9.

P.S.: Please check MPC-HC from this page: http://www.xvidvideo.ru/ - it has got the latest binaries, i think. (Incl. SSE2 and x64 Binaries)

P.P.S.: Since i do not know the Version numbers of DirectX9, i do not know, if you have got the latest version. Please Check:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d

[namaiki]

I think the DX9 Runtime web installer should be good as well. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

[Veazer]

AFAIK only EVR(simple) works in XP (as long as you have net framework 3.0 or higher installed), not EVR Custom/Sync. You might give a try to VMR9/7 though.

Yeah you're right, standard EVR is working fine without errors. I was wondering why EVR CP and EVR sync worked better than overlay despite the errors and now i can see it was rolling back to EVR. If i just specify EVR it works the same and no errors.

I read in the SageTV forum that EVR renderers work on XP but NOT for hardware decoding because XP lacks DXVA2. I removed the decoder and tried again using FFDshow and Core, they both fail with EVR CP, EVR Sync and Haali as well... :( What's strange though is I am 100% sure I have used both EVR CP and Haali on 2 other netbooks (with XP), namely the Acer Aspire One and the Asus 1000H. Both use the same CPU, chipset and graphics as the Dell Mini 9. I'm sure they worked because I was able to use MPC's internal sub renderer. I went back to overlay for those machines only because it had lower CPU use and without the hardware decoder you need as much CPU as possible if you want to watch 720p h.264 on an intel atom.

I guess I'll be using standard EVR and DirectVobSub for subs on this machine... bummer

That is quite right - EVR is intended for VISTA and above only - in Fact EVR is very similar to VMR9.

No, as Edigee pointed out EVR works on XP with .net 3.x

P.S.: Please check MPC-HC from this page: http://www.xvidvideo.ru/ - it has got the latest binaries, i think. (Incl. SSE2 and x64 Binaries)

Same problem on that build, sorry. Thanks for that link though.

P.P.S.: Since i do not know the Version numbers of DirectX9, i do not know, if you have got the latest version. Please Check:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d
Yeah, it's the latest DX available.

Now I'm totally puzzled why those renderers worked fine on the other 2 netbooks. I'm a little suspicious that MS has broken the support in the DirectX update.

Thanks for everyone's input.

[tetsuo55]

Yeah with XP you will have to use VMR9-Renderless

Also make sure you actually install a recent driver for your onboard videocard, ms default drivers tend to cause error messages like the ones you showed.

[Veazer]

Yeah with XP you will have to use VMR9-Renderless

Also make sure you actually install a recent driver for your onboard videocard, ms default drivers tend to cause error messages like the ones you showed.

I get an error for VMR9/VMR7 Renderless also:

Error creating DX9 Allocation presenter (Window title)
CreateDevice failed

D3DERR_INVALIDCALL

Any reason to choose that over standard EVR other than subtitles?

I am using the latest intel driver for the GMA 950, 6.14.10.4926.

It's frustrating that all these renderers worked on the previous netbooks but not this one.

[Snowknight26]

Sounds like a case of a really bad IGP. I'm guessing the hardware just doesn't have the capability of running either of those renderers, but without a better error (such as invalid refresh rate, invalid color depth, backbuffer format, etc), it's hard to say.

[Veazer]

Great news...

I was playing around on the Mini9 and noticed it was giving .net errors and complaining about missing .net files. The files reported missing were present and registered, but clearly something was wrong with my .net install. I knew EVR was included with .net 3.x so I decided to reimage the machine with a fresh acronis image of XP. I knew .net was working fine on this XP installation.

Now Haali and EVR CP work great. EVR Sync still gives the same error but I'll assume that renderer only works for Vista and later for the time being. I'm just happy to be able to use EVR CP and have subs straight from MPC.

Friends and family liked my Dell mini so i've been buying them off ebay and doing a fresh OS install for them. I was working with 5 different Dell Mini 9s and suddenly had a new issue. One of the machines could use EVR CP but not for all videos, some would just hang and MPC needed to be killed in task manager. I tried to isolate the problem and noticed that all SD videos worked, some 720p videos hung, and all 1080p material hung. This seemed like a video memory issue and sure enough the driver reported that the maximum available memory for the IGP was 32MB. All the other machines reported 96 or 128MB, depending on how much total memory the machine had. The machine giving problems had 2GB on board. I tried different drivers, I tried tweaking graphics settings, even forcing a BIOS update ( i already had the latest BIOS so forcing was necessary) There were no settings related to graphics in the BIOS so there wasn't much to try there. I was totally baffled, I could put the drive from the problem machine in another with identical hardware and BIOS settings and it would work fine, but nothing I tried would make that problem machine allot more than 32mb of memory for the IGP.

As a last ditch effort i reset the BIOS to the default settings and rebooted. Perfect! I now had 128mb available for video and 1080p videos played back just fine.

So... 2 lessons to be learned here:

1) If EVR CP or other renderers are not working for you on an XP machine, it could be a corrupt .net installation.

2) If you ever have an IGP equipped (crippled?) machine that isn't getting the video memory it should, try resetting the BIOS to default settings.

Thanks again to all who offered assistance.

[ale5000]

EVR Sync still gives the same error but I'll assume that renderer only works for Vista and later for the time being.

Just 2 more lessons:
1) EVR Sync works perfectly on Windows XP.
2) Intel video cards are s**t.

[edigee]

Just 2 more lessons:
1) EVR Sync works perfectly on Windows XP.
2) Intel video cards are s**t.

Do you have EVR Sync in XP? With subtitles? (not via DirectVobSub).

@Veazer.
Switching to Vista or Windows 7 would solve all the problems , plus you'd have DXVA available for your Intel GMA4500. That means a much lower power consumption(which is mandatory for a laptop).

[ale5000]

Yes, EVR Sync on XP with the internal subtitle render (I have a nVIDIA video card in the laptop).

[Veazer]

Just 2 more lessons:
1) EVR Sync works perfectly on Windows XP.
2) Intel video cards are s**t.

1) I was just reporting my experience with it so far, happy to hear it is working for you.
2) Hence the reason for using a supplemental h.264 decoder. It's not as if upgrading the video card is an option.

@Veazer.
Switching to Vista or Windows 7 would solve all the problems , plus you'd have DXVA available for your Intel GMA4500. That means a much lower power consumption(which is mandatory for a laptop).

Running Win7 on a single core atom isn't much fun though, and at this point there aren't any problems remaining other than EVR sync and i'm not bothered about that. Not to mention Win7 would probably cost more than the machine itself.

The GMA4500 is on a different machine than the Dell Mini, i was just comparing h.264 decoding ("so far I like it much better than the hardware decoding on my other laptop using an intel GMA4500MHD.") The Dell Mini runs a lowly GMA 950 and I'm using the Broadcom BCM970015 for h.264 decoding. Unlike Intel, Broadcom does provide working DXVA drivers for XP so I am able to use the card fully on XP. Using the Broadcom decoder the machine is around 15-20% cpu use with 720p material.

[namaiki]

Just curious, Veazer, but does your Broadcom BCM970015 seem to automatically downscale 1920x1080 video to 1280x720?
(First, also make sure that you are not using Overlay Mixer in MPC-HC - "View-> Options-> Output" and then open a 1920x1080 video in MPC-HC using the Broadcom Video Decoder, and click View-> Properties-> Details-> check "Video size" in the top)

Mine does and it's annoying the heck out of me. I can't figure it out!

[Veazer]

Just curious, Veazer, but does your Broadcom BCM970015 seem to automatically downscale 1920x1080 video to 1280x720?
(First, also make sure that you are not using Overlay Mixer in MPC-HC - "View-> Options-> Output" and then open a 1920x1080 video in MPC-HC using the Broadcom Video Decoder, and click View-> Properties-> Details-> check "Video size" in the top)

Mine does and it's annoying the heck out of me. I can't figure it out!

I've pulled it out of the machine at the moment. I'll pop it back in if i have time this weekend and test.

[namaiki]

Thanks. The issue has been driving me nuts.

[shinedot]

Namaiki: had the same problem untill yesterday. I dont use mpchc on my netbook with broadcom as mpc performance is very poor. i used splash pro, had a little better performance but not good as well. yesterday there was an update for splash pro and it is working much much better now. Better performance and full HD output for 1080p @24fps (no downscalling!). I tested this on Win7 with internal display and external monitor (1680x1050). Works great.

1080 60i is still downscalled and looks bad, a little maybe better than on WMP. mpchc crashes usually on my machine :/
but 24p works cool with splash.

On splash pro twitter they posted that this is first player for Windows and Crystal HD that output not downscalled video,
i dont know if it is first but for me works. I hope it will help you anyway.