MPC - HC: Mark II MOV Files Stopped Playing

[audiohominis]

Hi guys.
I was so delighted when MOV playback was implemented in MPC-HC x64. It worked perfectly! Life was beautiful, until earlier today, when I found MPC was suddenly unable to play MOV files. "WFT", I thought. The message at the bottom would say Playing [DXVA] but the playhead wouldn't even move. The same files would still play fine in QT and VLC. I concluded (hastily, as it later turned out) that MPC-HC had started to have problems with MOVs and went ahead and left a ticket at MPC's SourceForge support forum. Later, I discovered that the format wasn't to blame. The program was able to play MOVs from other sources, even though they used same/similar codec. Furthermore, I tried re-exporting the movie as MP4 using QT's Pass-Through mode, which does not re-encode but merely re-muxes the streams into MP4. It still wouldn't play. Moreover, Premiere stopped recognizing those files. This suggested that there was some kind of global problem on my system with the interpretation of that particular format.
The only thing I can think of that may have caused this is that I recently updates my graphics card driver. However, I can't quite recall whether I made any attempts to play MOV shortly thereafter, so this is a speculation.
Info per VLC:
Video: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1), 1920x1080 23.976p
Audio: PCM S16 LE (sowt), Stereo, 48000Hz, 16Bit

[JanWillem32]

What does MediaInfo say about your video? It might give some insight about the specific encoding of the AVC video in the container, the PCM audio is very simple to decode by the way.

[audiohominis]

General
CompleteName : C:\Canon_EOS_5D_MarkII_footage.mov
Format : MPEG-4
Format_Profile : QuickTime
CodecID : qt
FileSize/String : 16.5 MiB
Duration/String : 3s 795ms
OverallBitRate/String : 36.5 Mbps
Encoded_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45
Tagged_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45

Video
ID/String : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format_Profile : Baseline@L5.0
Format_Settings_CABAC/String : No
Format_Settings_RefFrames/String : 1 frame
CodecID : avc1
CodecID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration/String : 3s 795ms
BitRate_Mode/String : Variable
BitRate/String : 35.0 Mbps
Width/String : 1 920 pixels
Height/String : 1 080 pixels
Height_Original/String : 1 088 pixels
DisplayAspectRatio/String : 16:9
DisplayAspectRatio_Original/Stri : 16:9
FrameRate_Mode/String : Constant
FrameRate/String : 23.976 fps
ColorSpace : YUV
ChromaSubsampling : 4:2:0
BitDepth/String : 8 bits
ScanType/String : Progressive
Bits-(Pixel*Frame) : 0.704
StreamSize/String : 15.8 MiB (96%)
Language/String : English
Encoded_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45
Tagged_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45
Color primaries : BT.709-5, BT.1361, IEC 61966-2-4, SMPTE RP177
Transfer characteristics : BT.709-5, BT.1361
Matrix coefficients : BT.601-6 525, BT.1358 525, BT.1700 NTSC, SMPTE 170M

Audio
ID/String : 2
Format : PCM
Format_Settings_Endianness : Little
Format_Settings_Sign : Signed
CodecID : sowt
Duration/String : 3s 795ms
BitRate_Mode/String : Constant
BitRate/String : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s)/String : 2 channels
SamplingRate/String : 48.0 KHz
BitDepth/String : 16 bits
StreamSize/String : 712 KiB (4%)
Language/String : English
Encoded_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45
Tagged_Date : UTC 2010-11-04 16:23:45

[JanWillem32]

I can only find a non-standard Height_Original/String, this field is mostly used with a value larger than 1080 for interlaced video, but it's probably just your camera using cropping to get a 1920×1080 pixels frame.
The 5.0 baseline profile can be more of a problem, it's above the Blu-ray standard of 4.1. Only recent graphic drivers tend to support it properly. Make sure you use a recent driver. The tool DXVA checker can display an overview of the video acceleration settings in the registry (it's in the top-right triangle button's menu, or Ctrl+V). Can you post what settings you are using? You can choose the save option and use notepad open the VAS text file.

[Inspector.Gadget]

Format_Profile : Baseline@L5.0

In the MPC-HC H.264 DXVA decoder config, make sure compatibility check is set to "Skip level check"; if that still fails, set it to "Skip all checks". Your problem could also be caused by skipping the level check already. If MPC-HC still hangs, or you get obvious artifacts in decoding despite disabling the compatibility checks, you'll need to watch with a non-DXVA decoder.

[audiohominis]

In the MPC-HC H.264 DXVA decoder config
I can't seem to find those params in options, how do I access those?

Also, I've never had to tweak the player. Those files used to play perfectly fine before.

Thanks.

[Inspector.Gadget]

I can't seem to find those params in options, how do I access those?

Click me: http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2307/controlsh.th.png (http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2307/controlsh.png)

Also, I've never had to tweak the player. Those files used to play perfectly fine before.

An updated graphics driver might have altered the reported capabilities of your GPU. Level check is in some cases merely a formality but in others reflects the actual limit of the GPU.

[audiohominis]

Sadly, neither 'Full Check' nor 'Skip All Checks' nor anything in-between worked.:(

[Inspector.Gadget]

Well, it sounds like a recent round of graphics driver updates might have limited your card's capabilities in ways that skipping checks can't work around. Try deselecting the H.264 DXVA decoder and enabling the H.264 (ffmpeg) decoder. See if the videos play normally.

[audiohominis]

Haha. At least .M2T's used to do fine but now it's stopped playing them too.
Phenomenal:angry:

[audiohominis]

@ Inspector.Gadget
I want to be clear that the .M2T's stopped playing before I read your post and tried your suggestion, so by no means was that emoticon targeted at you, that was just me venting out. I'm bringing this up because I don't want you to think: "Now there's a thankless asshole".:p