LAV CUVID Decoder - High Quality Hardware decoding for NVIDIA

[Lincoln Burrows]

OK, I give up.

For some strange reason, m2ts files from this Blu-ray are refusing to accept the LAV Audio Decoder.

Maybe because they are DTS-HD HRA XBR and not DTS-HD MA ?

You were right, I had to add the LAV Splitter here. And while the m2ts extension (according to the Codec Tweak Tool) is using LAV Splitter, I can only make it work with LAV Video Decoder. Any attempts to use LAV Audio Decoder will result in using another filter. In this case, Sonic or any other filter (like MPC internal filter), but never LAV's.

http://i.imgur.com/g7dvd.png
We need to activate mp3 here to use LAV Audio Decoder... otherwise ffdshow audio decoder will be loaded by MPC

As you can see from these pictures, I tested another file, this time AVI, and MP3, and I changed LAV Audio Decoder settings to recognize the MP3 extension. It worked, and it wasn't necessary to block ffdshow.

http://i.imgur.com/Id4nc.png

http://i.imgur.com/UUtAi.png

But this m2ts file is not cooperating at all...

P.S. Another possibility is that LAV Audio Decoder does not support DTS-HD in the first place. Can anyone confirm that?

[Lincoln Burrows]

I think I solved the mistery, and now both LAV Video/Audio decoders are being displayed in the filter list from the m2ts!

http://i.imgur.com/YgxSy.png

I had to disable all these settings:

http://i.imgur.com/0cJPR.png

[Mikey2]

Lincoln Burrows - Although you have several things going on, let me suggest trying to use ReClock to help with you sync issues. What country are you from? In America we have 24FPS (frames per second) for movies and 60 FPS/30FPS (interlaced "NTSC") for Television material. You can use "MediaInfo" (included in K-lite codec pack) to find out the source's fps. And the reason I ask the country you're from is because we use 60fps (NTSC) on our TV monitors and 24 (or 72 (24*3) on better displays suck as mine. 120Hz is the best since it is both a multiple of 24 and of 60.) ReClock is a great tool that will use this info in conjunction with your actual display's Hz (essentially fps) to re-sync and properly playback everything (for instance, most movies are 23.976 fps or something instead of 24 fps...) More importantly, it will compensate for 25 fps PAL sources down to 24 (or vice-versa) ...this is very significant, the actual displayed show/movie w/o this tool will be shorter by 2 minutes or so per hour!

As far as playing HD audio, such as DTS-MA, what Video-Card/Audio-card are you using? This is still somewhat "bleeding edge" since they are only now overcoming PAP ("Protective Audio Path") in order to play HD audio without down-sampling somewhere down the chain. I have a Xonar audio-card (basically first one to fully allow TrueHD and DTS-MA without down-sampling.) However, my card requires that you use the Arcsoft Audio Renderer to play HD-Audio. In addition, I found the most luck using ffdshow Audio as the audio filter in this case. (It is the only one that I know of that will truly read the full DTS-MA track and not just playback the DTS-core track...but the settings are tricky and you have to make sure to use "pass-through" (even though obviously you cannot use SPDIF/TOS since only HDMI will allow bit-streaming at such high band-width's. IMHO it's pretty counter-intuitive...)

I hope this helps, I still use LAV Splitter and LAV Video decoder BTW, and keep in mind that software encoding (CUVID off) makes no difference on picture quality - with it off it just does the work on the CPU instead of the GPU - many people incorrectly assumes that HW Decoding is necessary or better-looking when in fact they are over-loading their video-cards and under-utilizing their CPU's. (See my long post on the last page for my own issues on this matter.) While rendering has great implications on video-quality, wherever you do the decoding and whatever tool you use will make no difference on video-quality. (It's like unzipping a file - however you do it does not matter, it just works or does not work...)

Finally remember that de-interlacing is only needed on interlaced materials. People seem to focus on this a lot which makes little sense since most DVD/mkv/avi/and almost *all* Blu-Rays are progressive material (that's the "P" in 1080P or 720P) so de-interlacing should be shut-off unless that is the video's source (i.e. 480i, 1080i - the "i" meaning "interlaced") .

Feel free to respond via PM or in this thread if you need more help. I spent years figuring all of this out and I'd be happy to help others like you that are obviously intelligent but are still in the learning-curve of all this stuff...

cheers!
MikeY

[nevcairiel]

de-interlacing should be shut-off unless that is the video's source (i.e. 480i, 1080i - the "i" meaning "interlaced") .


Deinterlacing is smart and only works on content that actually is interlaced, its perfectly safe to leave the options as-is. (Unless the content is actually progressive but mistakenly encoded as interlaced, but thats another matter entirely)

[Lincoln Burrows]

Lincoln Burrows - Although you have several things going on, let me suggest trying to use ReClock to help with you sync issues. What country are you from? In America we have 24FPS (frames per second) for movies and 60 FPS/30FPS (interlaced "NTSC") for Television material. You can use "MediaInfo" (included in K-lite codec pack) to find out the source's fps. And the reason I ask the country you're from is because we use 60fps (NTSC) on our TV monitors and 24 (or 72 (24*3) on better displays suck as mine. 120Hz is the best since it is both a multiple of 24 and of 60.) ReClock is a great tool that will use this info in conjunction with your actual display's Hz (essentially fps) to re-sync and properly playback everything (for instance, most movies are 23.976 fps or something instead of 24 fps...) More importantly, it will compensate for 25 fps PAL sources down to 24 (or vice-versa) ...this is very significant, the actual displayed show/movie w/o this tool will be shorter by 2 minutes or so per hour!

As far as playing HD audio, such as DTS-MA, what Video-Card/Audio-card are you using? This is still somewhat "bleeding edge" since they are only now overcoming PAP ("Protective Audio Path") in order to play HD audio without down-sampling somewhere down the chain. I have a Xonar audio-card (basically first one to fully allow TrueHD and DTS-MA without down-sampling.) However, my card requires that you use the Arcsoft Audio Renderer to play HD-Audio. In addition, I found the most luck using ffdshow Audio as the audio filter in this case. (It is the only one that I know of that will truly read the full DTS-MA track and not just playback the DTS-core track...but the settings are tricky and you have to make sure to use "pass-through" (even though obviously you cannot use SPDIF/TOS since only HDMI will allow bit-streaming at such high band-width's. IMHO it's pretty counter-intuitive...)

I hope this helps, I still use LAV Splitter and LAV Video decoder BTW, and keep in mind that software encoding (CUVID off) makes no difference on picture quality - with it off it just does the work on the CPU instead of the GPU - many people incorrectly assumes that HW Decoding is necessary or better-looking when in fact they are over-loading their video-cards and under-utilizing their CPU's. (See my long post on the last page for my own issues on this matter.) While rendering has great implications on video-quality, wherever you do the decoding and whatever tool you use will make no difference on video-quality. (It's like unzipping a file - however you do it does not matter, it just works or does not work...)

Finally remember that de-interlacing is only needed on interlaced materials. People seem to focus on this a lot which makes little sense since most DVD/mkv/avi/and almost *all* Blu-Rays are progressive material (that's the "P" in 1080P or 720P) so de-interlacing should be shut-off unless that is the video's source (i.e. 480i, 1080i - the "i" meaning "interlaced") .

Feel free to respond via PM or in this thread if you need more help. I spent years figuring all of this out and I'd be happy to help others like you that are obviously intelligent but are still in the learning-curve of all this stuff...

cheers!
MikeYI am currently using a LG W2452V monitor, the full specs can be found here:
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review/2008/review-lg-w2452v.html

The country is Brazil, but I don't think it makes any difference in this regard. The video card is 8800 GTS 512 MB, in Core Quad 9450, 2 GB/RAM DDR2-800, Windows 7, Abit IP35 Pro (motherboard), Hard Drive 7200 RPM... I guess this is it.

Even using LAV Audio Decoder I still have audio sync issues with this .m2ts file from the 1080i (60i) source:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Torchwood-The-Complete-First-Season-Blu-ray/923/#Review

It's barely noticeable, but it's there, in some scenes you are listening to the audio track after the lips start moving. However, I haven't noticed any problems using Total MediaTheatre, which is a proprietary software from Arcsoft. Why can't we use their decoder?

And it's probably something I am experiencing, not you. Someone explained to me in another thread that my video card (dated 2007 - so it's old now, specially for HD contents) - does not support VC-1 fully (only H264/AVC), so the minor audio delay while using Media Player Classic-Home Cinema must be related to this. I didn't noticed the same audio sync issue with other titles.

[wanezhiling]

I couldn't find another MPEG4-ASP HW decoder for Nvidia(VP4/VP5) except the outdated one..

Though CPU is easy to do this, it's really a little pity because UVD3.0 could use ArcSoft/PotPlayer/WMP12 to decode XVID, Nvidia has none now...:(

[nevcairiel]

LAV Video 0.45 will have MPEG4 support through cuvid, and maybe if i get bored some time, also for DXVA2

[Sebastiii]

Nice one :)

[Cyber-Mav]

is there a certain driver version requirement for MPEG4-ASP hardware acceleration?

[nevcairiel]

is there a certain driver version requirement for MPEG4-ASP hardware acceleration?

No idea, probably.
There is also a hardware limitation, only VP4 and above supports it.

[wanezhiling]

is there a certain driver version requirement for MPEG4-ASP hardware acceleration?

1. vista/2008/win7
2. nvidia purevideo VP4/5

enough

[Cyber-Mav]

i meed the hardware requirements, but looks like there is no decoder available yet to make use of the hardware for decoding xvid via gpu.

[Mikey2]

I am currently using a LG W2452V monitor, the full specs can be found here:
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review/2008/review-lg-w2452v.html

The country is Brazil, but I don't think it makes any difference in this regard. The video card is 8800 GTS 512 MB, in Core Quad 9450, 2 GB/RAM DDR2-800, Windows 7, Abit IP35 Pro (motherboard), Hard Drive 7200 RPM... I guess this is it.

Even using LAV Audio Decoder I still have audio sync issues with this .m2ts file from the 1080i (60i) source:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Torchwood-The-Complete-First-Season-Blu-ray/923/#Review

It's barely noticeable, but it's there, in some scenes you are listening to the audio track after the lips start moving. However, I haven't noticed any problems using Total MediaTheatre, which is a proprietary software from Arcsoft. Why can't we use their decoder?

And it's probably something I am experiencing, not you. Someone explained to me in another thread that my video card (dated 2007 - so it's old now, specially for HD contents) - does not support VC-1 fully (only H264/AVC), so the minor audio delay while using Media Player Classic-Home Cinema must be related to this. I didn't noticed the same audio sync issue with other titles.

Actually my specs are pretty close to your's-a strong overclocked CPU (Q6600-4core) and an even weaker video-card (Nvidia 8600GT.)

I also have a lot of experience using Arcsoft codecs in MPC (this is because I *have* to use their renderer in order to pass-through DTS-MA or TrueHD.) Long story, it can be done, but it's really tricky (the GUI for the Standalone Arcsoft decoder is buggy since it's not used in TMT for instance.)

I'm typing this at the auto mechanic on my phone, so I cannot go into more detail right now. A few questions (sorry if they're answered in your earlier posts-it's too tough to check on the phone.)

-I've seen you talk about multiple fps's...which has the sync issues (60fps?) The reason I ask what country is some countries use PAL for their tv's (this is on the tv itself) (25/50 fps) and others use NTSC (60 fps with movies at 24 (not 25 fps.) If your source material is 25 and your tv is 24, or if the source is 60 and your display is 50...there's your audio disconnect! Arcsoft handles this internally but Reclock does even better.

-If it is a matter of overloading your GPU I would suggest looking into software decoding (ie turn off CUVID...set it to "none")

-Are you having these problems with Lossless material (like TrueHD) or lossy? Your screenshots are all over the place-for instance you don't have h264 selected as an input on the video decoder and you didn't have DTS selected on the audio decoder. that will cause it to bypass to the next highest merit codec. In short, they're handled completely differently.

Ok my car is ready...I hope this helps. Id be willing to chat you through in more detail when your home (like checking GPU-Z, codec merits, input settings, etc...)

[Mosley]

I've tested LAV CUVID on my HTPC Asrock 330ION with ATOM330 CPU and nVidia ION GPU, but the performance is rather slow if compared with CoreAVC CUDA, even if I get the best results with ffdshow DXVA decoder or MPC-HC DXVA internal decoder. Instead, I love LAV splitter, which on my HTPC is much more performant then Haali.

[leeperry]

hi nev, this splitter is getting better and better so kudos for that =)

I've had some problems w/ some 25fps progessive mpeg2 content that would output as 50fps for some reason...I'll try to come up w/ a sample, but do you think you could possibly put the version number on the very top of this thread please?

so when we hover the mouse on top of your thread, we could see the latest version number as w/ mVR: http://thumbnails29.imagebam.com/17291/bbb649172902168.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/bbb649172902168)

:thanks:

[nevcairiel]

Its kind of useless to mention a version number for a filter that is essentially dead and deprecated, so i put that commend in there instead. :p

[wanezhiling]

I've tested LAV CUVID on my HTPC Asrock 330ION with ATOM330 CPU and nVidia ION GPU, but the performance is rather slow if compared with CoreAVC CUDA, even if I get the best results with ffdshow DXVA decoder or MPC-HC DXVA internal decoder. Instead, I love LAV splitter, which on my HTPC is much more performant then Haali.

This LAV CUVID decoder has outdated for a long time..

Look here:http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191
Use this please, my test result always shows that LAV Video(CUVID) performs faster than CoreAVC CUDA or ffdshow DXVA on my VP4 card or VP5.

[leeperry]

Its kind of useless to mention a version number for a filter that is essentially dead and deprecated, so i put that commend in there instead. :p
great! if you could also add the date next to it, that'd be really sweet...coz as much as I remember the version number of mVR and Reclock, I can't recall those of PotP/ffdshow and all associated splitters/decoders :o

I've sent you a link in PM to that sample I mentioned earlier.

:thanks:

[kostasoft]

Whether there will be a support of decoding MVC in the subsequent versions of the LAVFilters?

[oddball]

Why is this thread still at the top of the page? Dump this already. LAV Filters should be at the top! BTW I think both LAV CUVID or LAV Filters should be in the same subforum it's confusing :P

[nevcairiel]

Its on the top of the page because people like you keep pushing it. :P

[Alexey1975]

I vote for LAV CUVID Decoder continued to live and updated!
And that's why:
1. It's a PURE hardware mode decoder.
2. When I using it, I can be sure that the GPU only is processing the video, but not CPU. It has meaning when you need all CPU power for another purposes. (LAV Video Decoder, sometimes, not switch to hardware mode (for ex.: when using DVB Viewer with H.264 streams), unlike LAV CUVID Decoder).

Maybe 'Pure Hardware Mode' option for LAV Video Decoder will solve it? ... ;)

[nevcairiel]

You can vote all you want, its not going to change anything.

[Alexey1975]

You are nice, thanks!

[Mosley]

This LAV CUVID decoder has outdated for a long time..

Look here:http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191
Use this please, my test result always shows that LAV Video(CUVID) performs faster than CoreAVC CUDA or ffdshow DXVA on my VP4 card or VP5.

Ok. I tested LAV Video Filter. Surprisingly in CUVID mode performance with my GPU (nVidia ION) is not good on "heavy" bluray with interlaced video, but in DXVA2 mode it work very well. DEFINITELY better than ffdshow.

Why such a big difference between CUVID and DXVA2?

[dukey]

Because in dxva mode the video is passed directly to the video renderer. In CUVID mode, the video is copied out of video memory back into system ram. Then depending on the renderer, copied back into video memory for presentation.

[nevcairiel]

An ION is probably just borderline fast enough to deal with CUVID, so that some content makes it go over the edge. ION is certainly not a fast system.

[Mosley]

Many thanks for your answers. ;)

[Lincoln Burrows]

http://i.imgur.com/rQnsg.png

One question:

I noticed it's necessary to change that "output mode" to 25/30 instead of 50/60 while watching 1080i contents (saved in Matroska (lossless) or not), otherwise we face audio sync problems. Is that change necessary? Once I changed, it seemed like the playback was fine.

[sneaker_ger]

GPU too slow?

Probably want to ask questions in the new thread, though:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=156191