ffdshow development #2

[Mug Funky]

hhe.. my system is messed up, but it's not particularly slow considering it's age. it outperforms a lot of machines built this year, simply because i removed all the bloat from win2k that i could find. of course, on pure CPU stuff it is nowhere near as fast as todays stuff. but running programs and what have you, it runs awesomely.

the clip i'm decoding originated from a PAL field-blend from hybrid NTSC, and i couldn't be bothered with restore24 because it made 30p pans jerky. so i smart-bobbed and encoded at 50p, 512x384.

as you can probably guess from that, it struggles to play back in realtime (though it does :)), but when i was using vobsub, it was just too much for the poor thing. ffdshow didn't have this problem.

mplayer is a fine player, and i use it quite a bit - for one thing, "mplayer -fs *.*" is more useful than you'd think :)

unfortunately it's subtitle rendering seems to be b0rk on the compile i have (i'll try get a new one asap) - chroma isn't rendered, it is simply copied from the frame underneath. this is watchable a lot of the time, but when there's strong colour present, the subs look fugly like you wouldn't believe.

mplayer does indeed decode these files with speed to spare.

next time i'll encode interlaced, but i don't like doing this because then i need to bob on playback, and not everything does this all that well - my viddy card can do a dumb bob, but only when asked.

[edit]

holy crap! mplayer plays these files flawlessly at 50% CPU usage! that's amazing. i'm totally amazement :)

[edit 2]

decoding to -vo null gets me 30% CPU usage... but it's no fun unless you can watch it :)

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
unfortunately its subtitle rendering seems to be b0rk on the compile i have (i'll try get a new one asap) - chroma isn't rendered, it is simply copied from the frame underneath. this is watchable a lot of the time, but when there's strong colour present, the subs look fugly like you wouldn't believe.
Not a bug, just a design limitation. It's being worked on, along with the SSA renderer. But I have no estimate for when the new version will be usable.
(BTW, I happen to like the semi-transparent look, though I agree it's ugly when applied to a really strong chroma.)

[BlindWanderer]

I have a file with muxed subs that i'm not exactly sure how they were prepared but...

ffdshow when rendering the subs displays a box character at the end of the each line (mpc doesn't do this). I suspect it's a line feed but i can't be sure. ( 0x0A or 0xOD); consequently could we have added a subtitle spy (text field that displays the last text to be rendered) and a character filter as to remove characters entered.

[eXistenZ_69]

Does anyone know how I can set ffdshow to output raw AC3 via s/pdif? It appears to be outputting padded AC3...

See the following thread for my problem description:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85535


Regards,

eXistenZ_69

[Mug Funky]

akupenguin: thanks for the update :) mplayer is cool, and i follow it's development avidly.

[pogo stick]

Good news, everyone! :)
Milan added deinterlacing part of Minolta's patch for XviD to FFDShow! So now when "Overlay mixer" checked FFDShow not only displays video using PAR from bitstream, but also auto-deinterlace it if it's interlaced. I tried Celtic Druid's 20041119 build it with anamorphic, interlaced XviD encodes in mp4 and it seems to work very nice and fast!
Some stuff added to interface (as commented by Milan):
"Bypass" method (in deinterlacing part) is useful for changing fields order.
"HW deinterlacing" (near to "Overlay mixer") is supposed to disable added changes (for backward compatibility), but doesn't work yet.
Thanks Milan and Minolta for new feature! :)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hi pogo stick,

Can you provide a link to this build please?


Cheers

[pogo stick]

It's here: http://celticdruid.no-ip.com/xvid/ffdshow/

[minolta]

Even better, the auto-resize "expands" the window size in MPC (as opposed to shrinking image to window size). How...reinit image buffer? And it auto-deint divx as well. My old-favorite becomes my new-favorite decoder once again. Many thanks to Milan...:)

[Mug Funky]

hazzah! excellent.

i can start encoding interlaced again :)

my TV out is going to get SUCH a thrashing now.

[edit]

hmm... seems a little jumpy unless it's on "hardware deinterlacing". and in that case, i must output yuy2 for chroma to be done properly. the latter is probably a hardware issue with my archaic viddy card.

[edit 2]

output is really bloody good on HW deinterlace though. somehow nicer than powerDVD, even though i would have thought they did the same thing.

btw, for anyone out there with field-order problems, simply enable "offset" in ffdshow and move the pic up or down 1 pixel. turn it back off if field-order is correct, though. works a charm here.

[plonk420]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
output is really bloody good on HW deinterlace though. somehow nicer than powerDVD, even though i would have thought they did the same thing.

powerDVD 5 and earlier weren't very good IMO. watchable, but nothing you couldn't do with a simple remove even or odd field and reinterpolate. i don't know much about 6, tho.

OTOH, WinDVD 6's capabilities blew my socks off. seems to run at 50/60fps with non standard (24p/25p/30p) material, or something like a variable framerate. a friend said that FRAPS reported 50fps on a PAL source clip with sped-up sections (lazy editors) :p

[Mug Funky]

powerDVD 5 did dumb-bob, i think... i'm not sure. maybe i'm thinking of winDVD, as that's the first DVD player i had (ever!), along with the crappy and now dead Samsung drive it came with.

but a dumb-bob is all i need - just something to allow me to TV-out without randomly reversing field-order. i don't mind a little blur when the alternative is stuttering.

[IgorC]

would ffdshow support decoding of coming soon h.264 Ateme? It´s not comfortable to install (nero rom + nerovisonexpress3) approx. 50 Mbytes

[akupenguin]

yes, Real Soon Now (tm). But don't hold your breath, because I'm mostly trying to implement features in parallel with x264, not with Ateme.

[RadicalEd]

Aku, I feel the need to express my deep, explicitly heterosexual love for you at this instant.

[therealjoeblow]

Originally posted by BlindWanderer
I have a file with muxed subs that i'm not exactly sure how they were prepared but...

ffdshow when rendering the subs displays a box character at the end of the each line (mpc doesn't do this). I suspect it's a line feed but i can't be sure. ( 0x0A or 0xOD); consequently could we have added a subtitle spy (text field that displays the last text to be rendered) and a character filter as to remove characters entered.

Probably a unicode text sub muxed in. Try using disabling ffdshow's sub support and using vsfilter as a test. You then must make sure that you configure vsfilter to use a *unicode capable font* (one of the several variations of Tahoma is - you have to pick the correct one from the dropdown box when you choose Tahoma). If the box disappears or becomes a proper character, that's what the problem is.

FFDshow doesn't support unicode subs at the moment. I've asked for it here in this forum a couple of times. Hopefully it will come soon.

(of course, if that doesn't get rid of the box, then this wasn't the issue and you can feel free to yell at me...)

[therealjoeblow]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
hhe.. my system is messed up, but it's not particularly slow considering it's age. it outperforms a lot of machines built this year, simply because i removed all the bloat from win2k that i could find.

Not wanting to get too far off topic, could you provide a brief list of exactly what bloat you got rid of (and maybe how if it was complex)?

[Mug Funky]

i think there's possibly a memory leak while using AVIS for frameserving. i was serving a 2 gig DV file through avisynth into mencoder using AVIS, and towards the end my hard disk nearly exploded from swapping - i was using nearly 2 gigs of VM. not sure which part of the chain was doing it, but loading the DV file straight in gives me a constant memory usage, rather than an ever-increasing one.

tried both directshowsource and avisource in my script, but in both cases ffdshow was being used to decode, and also to serve. this may have something to do with it.

no big rush on this one - i should really start using avs2yuv anyway.

@ therealjoeblow:

hmm. while searching for a way to turn off windows messenger, i found (and subsequently lost) a page that described what all the windows services do, and which you could do without.

i'm sure a random google will turn up that page, or one like it. it's just a matter of a lot of registry hacking and disabling services through control panel's administrative tools.

i imagine it's harder to find all this in winXP... man, i am so glad i'm not running that - it's painful enough just to use it.

[iradic]

@therealjoeblow: try this ... http://www.techspot.com/guides-os.shtml

[leeperry]

i used to run ffdshow-20020617.exe which has always worked fine with all my WMV movies but the newest I could put my hands on : ffdshow-20041012-sse.exe, usually gives a BLACKSCREEN..

I've tried upgrading DirectX to 9.0c, and WMP to v10, to no success, and of course the old version worked like a champ when I downgraded..so something's broken like the default renderer or sumthing?

I run XP SP1, with the 61.76 Detonators on a Geforce4 Ti4200.

Could anyone see wth wrong ?
It's annoying to disable FFDSHOW each time :(

But apart from that, great piece of software!! 2 thumbs up :cool:

[Mug Funky]

hmm, as much as i don't like to deal with WMV, i've found that it works fine here. have you double-checked the codec settings so WMV is actually set to be decoded? the only thing i've tested with is the WMV of anna-nicole making a fool of herself at the AMAs the other week.

i'm playing through media player classic, on a p3 733, geforce DDR 32 (old old old).

[BlindWanderer]

Got a couple of bugs related to the Bitmap overlay.

1. can't use Vertical pos to push the overlay out of the frame.
2. extra line added to Bitmap overlay if overlay is of an uneven number of vertical lines (probably related to my input video being yv12). This extra line it adds is junk.

I'm using the December 1, build that milan posted for localizing ffdshow.

[Cyberace]

Hope I'm posting in the correct thread and are not off-topic with this request:

Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration (DirectX VA) support

This feature/function request is both for hardware acceleration (motion compensation) and post-processing via Microsofts DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dx81_c/directx_cpp/htm/directxvideoacceleration.asp), (be nice if the options should be added in to FFdshow config settings when auto-detect if the video cards supported it and to what extent );

Hope FFdshow developer(s) can look into if this could be fully or partially used for most of its supported codecs?

Summery: Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) allows DirectShow based software decoders to accelerate video playback directly on the graphics processors (GPU). If your graphics processor supports DXVA and has built-in technology to accelerate DVD and MPEG-2 file playback, then DXVA can provide (GPU) hardware acceleration. DVXA is an application programming interface (API) and a corresponding motion compensation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/ddraw_2ab799f5-77bc-497c-9c64-68903bb940fb.xml.asp) device driver interface (DDI) for acceleration of digital video decoding. DDIs are also provided as part of DXVA; a deinterlacing DDI (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/dxvaref_d72180f0-84bc-4acf-b263-6f6c7e9f7b22.xml.asp) for deinterlacing and frame-rate conversion of video content, and a to support ProcAmp DDI (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/dxvaref_557ca488-5ca9-4595-994f-18eafa171f77.xml.asp) control and postprocessing of video content. DXVA provides an interface definition focused on support of MPEG-2 "main profile" video (formally ITU-T H.262 | ISO/IEC 13818-2), but is also intended to support other key video codecs (for example, ITU-T Recommendations H.263 and H.261, and MPEG-1 and MPEG-4).

A good exampel of the benifits of using DVXA for video acceleration is that you could decode HDTV (ATSC/DTV) MPEG-2 with a PIII 733Mhz CPU, a task that would normaly require a PIII 1400Mhz CPU if the card does not support DVXA HWMC. Or if you have a faster CPU then you can record something at the same time as you are playing back something else on the same Windows PC, (as with DXVA most of the playback effort gets loaded onto the GPU so the CPU can be doing something more/else).

Other post-processing featutes achivable via DVXA (if the video adapter hardware support it):
- Hardware iDCT motion compensation and subpicture decoding
- Hardware based IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform)
- IQ (Inverse quantization)
- Fullframe video playback of HDTV and DVD content on slow CPU's (733Mhz +)
- Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
- Hardware colorspace conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- 5tap horizontal by 3tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
- Perpixel color keying
- Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD subpicture alphablended compositing
- Alpha-Blending Surface

Developer links:
- Microsoft Developer information on DirectX Video Acceleration (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/dxvaguide_30c21a63-691d-4ada-b469-08790b3b6c29.xml.asp)
- How Decoders Use IAMVideoAccelerator (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/howdecodersuseiamvideoaccelerator.asp)
- Mapping DirectX Video Acceleration to IAMVideoAccelerator (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/52mappingdirectxvatoiamvideoaccelerator.asp)
- DVXA API/DDI Specification (Rev 1.0) (DirectX 8.1 C++ Archive) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/dx81_c/directx_cpp/htm/directxvideoacceleration.asp)
- DirectShow DirectX Video Acceleration Video Subtypes (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/directshow/htm/directxvideoaccelerationdxvavideosubtypes.asp)
- Enabling DirectX Video Acceleration in a custom player (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmform95/htm/enablingdirectxvideoacceleration.asp)
- Windows Media Format 9.5 SDK Enabling DirectX Video Acceleration (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wmform95/htm/enablingdirectxvideoacceleration.asp)
- DirectX Video Acceleration Video Subtypes (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/directxvideoaccelerationdxvavideosubtypes.asp)
- IAMVideoAccelerator Operational Specification (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/522directxvaiamvideoacceleratoroperationalspecification.asp)
- DirectX Video Acceleration Motion Compensation Callbacks (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/ddraw_28178ef1-ce67-476d-bdf0-f854fc342b4c.xml.asp)
- Calling the Deinterlace DDI from a User-Mode Component (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/graphics/hh/graphics/dxvaguide_6691221e-f352-47f9-8345-b38d0955fd2a.xml.asp)
- Per-Pixel Alpha Blending (DirectX 9.0 C++ Archive) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/perpixelalphablending.asp)
....AND MUCH MORE available on a Microsoft Development Network search (http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?qu=dxva&View=msdn&st=b&c=0&s=1&swc=0)

Exampel of above DXVA technology in use is the newly announced "nVIDIA DVD Decoder", (as almost GForce/nForce GPU's support it).
nVIDIA DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) support MPEG-2 acceleration for:
Inverse quantization (IQ),
Inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT)
Motion compensation (mo comp)
Enables advanced de-interlacing
Decodes high-definition MPEG-2
http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/decoder_faq.html
(nVIDIA's part in the GPU that support this is called HDVP (http://www.nvidia.com/attach/149) (High Defininition Video Processor) / VPE (Video Processing Engine))

PS! My personal reason for wanting DXVA support by FFdshow is to have HDTV playback of MPEG-2/TS on slow PC

[Boco]

Think there might be a bug in divx 3 decoding. I got a file that crashes to the desktop when CelticDruid's latest build tries to decode it, but runs with the latest alpha on sourceforge (albet with a large green line on the bottem). I am using the cvs build (6.4.8.3) of MPC.

[celtic_druid]

No problems here with DivX 3 decoding either via dshow or VFW. Only tested two files though.

[Boco]

It was in a download of 26 similar video files. Only 1 crashed on open, and 1 other one crashed after playing for awhile. The rest played fine...

[dragongodz]

It was in a download of a 26 episode series.
:readrule:

[spyder]

@Cyberace

I believe it would be difficult to use DXVA in ffdshow's MPEG2 decoding as it's based on libmpeg2 which does all of those accelerated things internally. It could probably be used for scaling/deinterlacing etc though. On a side note, why do you need ffdshow for decoding HDTV MPEG2? Most software DVD player MPEG2 decoders will play it fine and even use DXVA to do it. I can play 1080i content with about 20-30% CPU usage on my 2500+ Athlon XP

[marius1]

Which version of AC3Filter's code is in the 1012 version of ffdshow? For AC3 encoding am I better off sticking to ffdshow or should I use the RC5 of AC3Filter? Thanks in advance.

[Cyberace]

Originally posted by spyder
@Cyberace

I believe it would be difficult to use DXVA in ffdshow's MPEG2 decoding as it's based on libmpeg2 which does all of those accelerated things internally. It could probably be used for scaling/deinterlacing etc though. On a side note, why do you need ffdshow for decoding HDTV MPEG2? Most software DVD player MPEG2 decoders will play it fine and even use DXVA to do it. I can play 1080i content with about 20-30% CPU usage on my 2500+ Athlon XP "difficult" or impossible? :rolleyes: ...every little helps and never say never ;)
(I got a 800Mhz PIII (underclocked) fanless PC as HTPC, yes I'm poor)
PS! Others could have faster PCs' but encoders running simultaneously

[kurt]

Originally posted by marius1
Which version of AC3Filter's code is in the 1012 version of ffdshow? For AC3 encoding am I better off sticking to ffdshow or should I use the RC5 of AC3Filter? Thanks in advance.

that depends on using spdif output or not .. on my machine ffdshow's AC3/dts audfilter doesn't work via spdif .. so I'm using latest AC3Filter (of course in wave out audio renderer) ..

[marius1]

Originally posted by kurt
that depends on using spdif output or not .. on my machine ffdshow's AC3/dts audfilter doesn't work via spdif .. so I'm using latest AC3Filter (of course in wave out audio renderer) ..

Actually ffdshow with AC3 audio works for me on spdif output. The only main diff between them I see in terms of functionality is that AC3Filter has the normalization feature.

[spyder]

@Cyberace

Of course it's not impossible. With enough rewriting you can make libmpeg2 decode MPEG4. The point is that it would probably require quite a few internal changes and I don't know that anyone is wanting to do that. As I said before, there are plenty of mpeg2 decoders that do this already. Using ffdshow to do it probably won't gain you much advantage over using the others as you can't do any post decode processing on the image(aside from deinterlacing/scalng maybe) using DXVA anyway.

[Cyberace]

Originally posted by spyder
@Cyberace, there are plenty of mpeg2 decoders that do this already.Are those mpeg2 decoders free and/or open source!?, in any case you can't argue with the fact that DvXA support in ffdshow would be a plus for all ffdshow users, if only some had the time and skill to code it for FFdshow, (and not just for MPEG2 as again DxVA support MPEG4 too if the GPU do that too (like VIA's latest GPU)


Originally posted by spyder
@Cyberace, you can't do any post decode processing on the image(aside from deinterlacing/scalng maybe) using DXVA.Personaly I think if deinterlacing (for MPEG-2) and scaling (for codec) could be done in GPU hardware that would be great!


PS! As all the specs/info for the DxVA interface are available online from Microsoft I would think it's more a matter of time and motivation than a matter of expertise on the developers side, (I could not do it myself as I'm not a programmer but probebely most existing FFdshow developers could?), don't you agree?

[Mug Funky]

cyberace: if your rig is too slow, try using mplayer to decode. it's not unusual to get double the performance under win32. i have no idea how fast it is in linux (i'd bet money that it's faster still).

the drawback is no hardware deinterlace and having to use commandline.

[nicco]

Is here any project to make ffdshow full compatible with nero digital?:)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by nicco
Is here any project to make ffdshow full compatible with nero digital?:) Now that NeroDigital's Mpeg4/AVC codec is officially available, I guess it's much easier for the FFdshow developers to make a decoder that works with all of NeroDigital's implementations.... so lets hope so.


Cheers

[BlindWanderer]

cyber: microsoft has a bad habbit of publishing documentation that isn't always accurate.

[Cyberace]

I have to say that I am very disappointed that you all are so quick to dismiss the idea of DxVA :(
I just hope the mistake is mine, that I asked the wrong crowd or at the wrong time and place :p

(PS! I won't disturb you anymore in this thread unless get some insight for a FFdshow developer)

[filewalker]

ffdshow-20041212.exe is out.


http://celticdruid.no-ip.com/xvid/ffdshow/

But I can't find a changelog...

Cu

[Amour]

Originally posted by filewalker
ffdshow-20041212.exe is out.

http://celticdruid.no-ip.com/xvid/ffdshow/
I tried it, but now when I close a player, sometimes I got this error message (sorry, it's in French):
L'instruction à "0x038c1177" emploie l'adresse mémoire "0x03bd83a0". La mémoire ne peut pas être "read".

Cliquez sur OK pour terminer le programme.

And here is a translation made by myself:
The instruction at "0x038c1177" uses memory address "0x03bd83a0". Memory cannot be "read".

Click OK to close the programm.

[hhanh]

I debugged through the last CVS version of ffdshow. This AV comes from the destructor of the encoder but the real problem comes from this line

-- src/ffmpeg/h264.c
if((avctx->extradata_size == 0) || (avctx->extradata == NULL)) {
av_log(avctx, AV_LOG_ERROR, "AVC codec requires avcC data\n");
return -1;
}

The strange thing is that I think the avcC is present because I could see one with mpeg4ip and also, this code is not in the ffmpeg latest alpha. VideoLan works so I'm looking into how it parses the sequence headers.

--h

[Leo 69]

Does it decode Recode's .mp4 files (avc)?

[hhanh]

Yes, with some limitations. B-Frames & weighted prediction are not supported AFAIK.

[Leo 69]

But...bidirectional prediction and weightlifting prediction
has not been supported by VLC-player for a long time already.
And something might have changed,since FFDShow and VLC player use the same libraries,don't they?Thats why I'm asking.

[hhanh]

No, they don't use the same libraries. ffdshow uses libavcodec and videolan has its own implementation.

--h

[chilledoutuk]

erm afaik both ffdshow and vlc use the ffmpeg project codecs that includes libav codecs.

ffmpeg supports playback of avc video streams as long as neither bframes or weighted prediction is used at the moment. But i have been informed that bframes will be supported soon which is great.

ffdshow is a directshow playback filter for an array of formats and it can play avc but in order for you to be able to play avc in .mp4's you need a .mp4 stream splitter that can deal with it containing avc video. currently afaik only the nero splitter can do this (3ivx etc cant well not for me) which means you need vision express installed to playback .mp4 avc in directshow media players.

Vlc on the other hand because of its independance of system codec and directshow settings has its own .mp4 splitter that can cope with avc in .mp4 files but is still limited to ffmpegs implimentation of avc (meaning no bframes or wighted prediction yet!!)

FYI I am using a nightly build of VLC i am not sure if the current release can play avc in .mp4's or not though.

[hhanh]

Yes, you're right - the decoding part is the same. I was looking at the h264 splitter code.

[saratoga]

Originally posted by BlindWanderer
cyber: microsoft has a bad habbit of publishing documentation that isn't always accurate.

Err not for their APIs they don't. MS lives and dies on developers using their APIs. I've always found their stuff to be extremely good in this respect.

Are you thinking of documentation for their proprietary formats maybe?

[plonk420]

It was in a download of a 26 episode series.
Originally posted by dragongodz
:readrule:

that's not necessarily illegal, not like a downloaded movie... that's the creed fansubbers go by at least ;p