LAV Filters - DirectShow Media Splitter and Decoders

[flossy_cake]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

And where does that single value come from?

The only way I can think of would be to match the filepath of the currently playing file to an entry in the database file. This appears to be how Kodi keeps track of what files you've played, and how MPC-HC knows the resume point for each media file. Ideally it would use a hash of the file as its unique ID to prevent collisions, but that is too slow to calculate on large media files, unless perhaps it was a hash of only the audio track, and the audio track is suitably small to keep processing time to a minimum (some audio tracks may be large). edit: or maybe just hash a practicably small number of data bytes from salted addresses inside the file.

Anyway, I remembered that Crendking made an Avisynth directshow plugin that could be used to automatically apply Normalize(0.98) globally to every file without any per-file user intervention, so I'll probably just use that instead.

I also made a script that automatically generates .avs files for all the media files in a top level folder (cloning the entire folder structure but with .avs files instead of media files) but it still requires quite a bit of intervention to ensure a compatible Avisynth source filter is used, and some manual scaling to correct for sources with nonsquare pixels, whereas Crendking's solution manages that automatically.

[senseipiledrive2]

I'd like some guidance to figure out if this an issue worth looking into or not. I am using the latest x64 version of lav 77.2 in combination with mpc-be. I use the default install options. All behavior and how the lav splitter, audio and video icons appear like normal when I open a file for playback.

**However, every time when I boot into Windows 11 (latest), I noticed in the task manager, under processes, there always seems to load a blue LAV filter icon with "Windows Host Process (Rundll32)" is written next to the icon. It uses 0 Cpu and 0.9MB of memory every time I look. It's the only rundll32 windows host process listed. Nothing seems to happen when I close it, files still open for playback like normal it appears. Is this normal? Should I disable it or just leave it be? I have ran SFC scannow and DISM restore with no change. Thanks all!

[ryrynz]

Originally Posted by senseipiledrive2

Should I disable it or just leave it be?

Sounds to me like it's related to some third party app that's installed on your system. I would think there's nothing wrong and you should leave it be, but if you have things installed on your PC you're not using uninstall them.

[senseipiledrive2]

I'm not sure how to figure out what put it there, but my guess was the LAV installer package. It does show a Blue LAV graphical icon next to the "Windows Host Process (Rundll32)." When I click open file location it just takes me to the system folder pointing me literally to just Rundll32, so maybe I'm not finding what installed it in the correct way. The only media player I have installed is MPC BE 1.6.6 x64 I use the latest nightly builds.

[el Filou]

This could happen if an application that loads with Windows uses videos and it then loads LAV Filter for them.
For example, Logitech Options does that on my HTPC when I open it because it embeds videos to show the different touchpad gestures, that it apprently uses DirectShow to render.
You could try SysInternals Process Explorer, which shows which app is the parent process.

[glorp]

The tray icons and their options are hosted by rundll32. Turn off the tray icon when LAV loads and you should see it disappear.

[mzso]

Hi!

I noticed that LAV icons disappear when I change DPI scaling percentage, and restart explorer. So I guess this is an issue with LAV?
Most tray icons do reappear, with Facebook's Messenger being the other exception I noticed.

I do this because I use my display both by sitting at the desk a from a couch from a greater distance. And without restarting explorer things appear wrong.

[mzso]

Originally Posted by senseipiledrive2

**However, every time when I boot into Windows 11 (latest), I noticed in the task manager, under processes, there always seems to load a blue LAV filter icon with "Windows Host Process (Rundll32)" is written next to the icon. It uses 0 Cpu and 0.9MB of memory every time I look. It's the only rundll32 windows host process listed. Nothing seems to happen when I close it, files still open for playback like normal it appears. Is this normal? Should I disable it or just leave it be? I have ran SFC scannow and DISM restore with no change. Thanks all!

Did you defrag your drive as well? As long as we're doing random things.

Anyway. Did you look the process in question via Process Explorer?

With that you can look at various properties of a process (most useful would probably be the command line and the running threads) and see the parent processes.

[el Filou]

Originally Posted by mzso

I noticed that LAV icons disappear when I change DPI scaling percentage, and restart explorer. So I guess this is an issue with LAV?

Could be because there is a shell extension that displays thumbnails for video file formats not supported natively by Windows, and that extension uses DirectShow and therefore the tray icons appear when you browse a folder with those types of videos in it in thumbnail view, Explorer load LAV through that shell extension to generate the thumbnails?
I remember this happening a long long time ago under XP with Haali splitter.
Edit: Anyway, I don't think it's LAV's fault or that nev can do anything about it, it's probably the app's fault. My media players that properly stop/close the playback graph don't leave LAV icons in the tray.

[nevcairiel]

Tray Icons are not designed to be permanent. They only show up when a LAV component is loaded. And they should disappear when the component is unloaded properly. Some things kill it a bit aggressively though, especially shell extensions.

[mzso]

Originally Posted by nevcairiel

Tray Icons are not designed to be permanent. They only show up when a LAV component is loaded. And they should disappear when the component is unloaded properly. Some things kill it a bit aggressively though, especially shell extensions.

LAV is not unloaded though. Playback is not necessarily interrupted at all. But the tray icons do disappear.

@el Filou

It's not that. I mean the icons that appear during playback. They disappear even though they should continue to be present.

[Sunspark]

Hi Nev, I think I have found an issue which is current as of 0.77.2 on Intel.

h264, L3.1 file, hw acceleration does work with intel quicksync, does not work with dxva-cb or dxva-native (displays avcodec instead).
vp9 files, no acceleration.

LAV does support dxva acceleration of L3.0 files, just not the L3.1 one so I'm thinking it might be a bug. The L3.1 file is dxva2 accelerated with the MPC video decoder.

Not sure about vp9 files. In DXVA Checker it does list "VP9_VLD_Intel: DXVA2/D3D11, SD / HD / FHD / 4K". Not sure if the "_Intel" is something special, there are no other rows for VP9 present while other codecs have duplicate rows with and without the "_Intel" part.

[nevcairiel]

"Level" is a largely irrelevant property. There is likely some other property about that file that prevents hardware acceleration.

A blind guess would be that its "baseline" profile, which is not supported in hardware, only "constrained baseline" is supported.

[Sunspark]

Well, I've uploaded the file here so you can download it. Not a big file, 12 megs: h264l31 problematic file

I feel if it's hw-decodable with quicksync and mpc, it should also be w/ the dxva decoders.

[nevcairiel]

Like I suspected, its baseline profile. Baseline is _not_ hardware compatible. Any given file might work, but there is no guarantee that it would, depending on what features it uses. If anything, other decoders sending baseline to a hardware decoder are bugged, not LAV.

I prefer to have some files not use hardware and all be decoded correctly, rather then use hardware and get decoding errors.

[Sunspark]

Hi Nev, I have a question about D3D11 hw decoding.

With madVR, if I set it to use D3D11 (I am aware that it is a wrapper around D3D9), set LAV to use D3D11-Automatic and then observe that the GPU usage % is almost double that of DXVA2-CopyBack in one of the D3D9 presentation modes, is this due to the Intel video driver, decoder or the renderer? It's confusing because when I tried D3D11-CopyBack via selecting the device, the GPU usage % stayed at the same number that Automatic had. I thought it would be another doubling, but that wasn't the case, the number was the same. So it feels like madVR is running in copyback in d3d11 despite displaying "native" on the filter. Should I see a difference between Automatic and CopyBack with this renderer in D3D11?

Thanks.

[el Filou]

With discrete GPUs, native DXVA (= Automatic in LAV D3D11) puts less load on the system (in theory) than copyback as you don't have to pass decoded frames back and forth over the PCIe bus, but as this is an iGPU you're already using system RAM for everything, so the difference can be much less or even none.

The higher load in D3D11 LAV decode and/or D3D11 madVR presentation mode could be a quirk of the Intel driver.

Note that you don't necessarily have to use D3D11 presentation in madVR to use D3D11 decoding in LAV, they are independent.
Did you try D3D11 in LAV with D3D9 presentation in madVR?

[Sunspark]

Good suggestion to try. I tested that just now.. left presentation mode in D3D9 overlay and put the decoder into D3D11. As measured with gpu-z, GPU usage was 14-15%. With DXVA2-CopyBack it was 12-13%. So for me, the d3d9 copyback decoding is slightly more efficient than d3d11 native decoding. With D3D11 presentation on, the GPU usage w/ D3D11 decoding becomes 21-22%. Putting it into dxva2-native and leaving it in d3d9 overlay the same number results, 21-22%. DXVA2-Native with D3d9 Windowed makes it 24-25%. Flipping it around to D3D11-Windowed and DXVA2-Native makes it even worse, 28-29%.

This is a normal file, h.264 high L4.0 1920x1080. No image scaling being performed, just 2-tap chroma shader scaling.

If I try using mpcvr in d3d11 and the mpc decoder in d3d11, I get a peak of 12% gpu usage, same result if I use LAV as the decoder. Based on that, I'm thinking it's probably not that much the driver, and more so the renderer.

[huhn]

these number doesn't mean anythign without the frequency which can vary drastically on old intel iGPU.
25% can mean less GPU usage then 12% sounds odd but makes total sense if you think about it.

[Sunspark]

I have the gpu set for maximum performance, so it says 900 MHz for the GPU clock. It seldom goes to 950, will go a little lower if it starts to overheat, but otherwise stays at that fixed number all the time. These recorded percentages are all at the same fixed clock.

I think it likely comes down to non-optimized paths for the current OS. 0.92.17 is almost 5 years old and the presentation code paths predate Windows 10. The D3D11 wrapper was implemented in 0.88 before Windows 10 was RTM. madshi did say back then more than once that Windows 8.1 was the best version to be using.