h.264 codecs
- Thread starter Snax
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i'm no expert but I can't see a massive quality difference between the two. I am a massive fan of ffdshow for things like upscaling and deinterlacing and the way you can fiddle with the settings to optimise the picture, but for h.264 its best to leave the stream unaltered as much as possible and so it loses the advantage.
These days things have got a bit more complicated as most modern cards will offload the h.264 processing to your gpu with very good quality.
What I suggest is that you use MPC-HC as it will handle DXVA acceleration where possible, plus it has good h.264 software support via libavcodec (came codec as ffdshow anyway) to fall back on. Its also a very clean solution as no codecs need to be registered with windows at all. Its also free which coreavc is not.
Above all avoid codec packs.
These days things have got a bit more complicated as most modern cards will offload the h.264 processing to your gpu with very good quality.
What I suggest is that you use MPC-HC as it will handle DXVA acceleration where possible, plus it has good h.264 software support via libavcodec (came codec as ffdshow anyway) to fall back on. Its also a very clean solution as no codecs need to be registered with windows at all. Its also free which coreavc is not.
Above all avoid codec packs.
This. FFDShow for everything else, MPC-HC DXVA with upsample shaders for x264 and CoreAVC to fall back on if its not DXVA compliant (very rare nowadays). Saying that the libavcodec is pretty equal to CoreAVC now, but CoreAVC is most likely to get good results on a low powered machine.
Well GFX cards are ruddy brilliant at video decoding, so you could get a marginally better image out of it. The main thing is the ability to use shaders. I use a combination of sharpen complex 2 and YV12 upsample (I think) and it gives HD material even more loveliness
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Soldato
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Quality is identical these days; choice is just on features really. CoreAVC has CUDA support which is preferable to DXVA is you have an nVidia card. Otherwise any DXVA decoder...
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I wouldn't go so far as to say identical.. but they are very similar. If you were to look for differences I'm sure you could find them.
VLC is noticeably different imo. CoreAVC vs MPC-HC's DXVA support is unnoticeable for me, but some people claim CoreAVC to be lower quality.
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If you're using Windows 7 it has a native h.264 decoder anyway, that supports DXVA too so no codec needed really.
Soldato
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Use the different decoders with one player (say MPC-HC) to take caps of the same frame. Near enough identical upon the closest inspection. It's the software and renderers that appear different.