Hardware accelerated X264 decoding

straxusii

straxusii

straxusii

Soldato
Joined
18 May 2003
Posts
4,894
I'm posting this as I've spent ages trying to get my HTPC to decode x264 in hardware and I hope this may help some people.

My video card is a HD3450 supporting UVD and it was by no means easy to get it decoding in hardware but I'm finally there.

I found the best media player to use was this one: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ It has to be the home cinema variant, not just mpc standard.

It supports UVD, and Nvidia's equivelant, out of the box and it shows you if hardware decoding is happening per clip (DXVA).


Not all x264 clips will work, and this is a great article detailing the hows and whys of encoding 264 for hardware acceleration: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=972503
 
I pulled my hair out 12 months ago trying to get a consistent x264 decoding in hardware..

In the end I gave up, too much inconsistency, so bought a Q6600 and used the Core AVC Pro codec (Multi-core support). CPU usage is < 10% for 1080p x264, which makes me wonder why I bothered with the Q6600. I've always used MPC-HC, it's a great clean player that is superb for messing with different codecs.

Is H/W accel offering any tangible visual IQ benefits these days?

I'm at a cross roads HTPC wise, my Father bought a popcorn hour A110 at Christmas, and brought it over for me to setup etc, and was quite impressed with it's performance, despite a couple of minor codec issues (seemingly regular updates are improving things all the time), it did seem to play back 99% of everything I threw at it, including the m2ts BR files.. Just a slight ? of HD Audio ability.
So I've toyed with the idea of ditching the 'forever' tweaking aroung HTPC and considering the A110 (I like the YAMJ front end), but if HW accel is starting to offer real benefits, I may stick to the HTPC.
 
I dont think they offer any IQ benefits over CoreAVC. CoreAVC is indeed very good.

I know what you mean about the out of the box players, I think I spend more time fiddling with software, drivers and codecs than I do watching anything on my HTPC :-)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom