choppy 1080p playback with some media players, but not others?

J

Jason

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 20, 2003
Messages
490
whilst trying out several different media players, i've found that 1080p playback is choppy in some instances, and in other instances it's just fine. i've used media player classic home cinema, vlc and just regular windows media player. the first two gave me choppy playback. the last did not.

first off, i'm sure that this choppiness issue i'm experiencing has nothing to do with hardware. my desktop doubles as my htpc, and i have within it:

xeon x3440 (2.53ghz quad core w/ ht)
4gb pc1600 ddr3 ram
radeon hd 5770
windows 7 pro x64

i'm outputting to a 50" panny plasma. when trying to watch some 1080p rips of planet earth (.m2ts files), with mpc-hc (both x86 and x64 versions) and vlc the sound is just fine but the video is incredibly choppy. plain 'ol wmp is just fine with both audio and video.

i'm using shark007's codec package.

any thoughts as to what's going on here? i'd like to get mpc-hc working so that i can offload the decoding onto my gpu and perhaps utilize some pixel shader features.




edit: it's important to note that 720p playback was fine with vlc. i have yet to test it with mpc-hc, though. and a majority of the files i'm playing are either m2ts, mkv or mp4.
 
Ugh..

Format and reinstall Win 7. Thats step one.

Step two, install a recent build of MPC-HC, not the old ones on the official website.
 
I have the same problem, with no codec packs or splitters installed. I doubt the shark007 codec pack is the problem personally. I reformatted, reinstalled (multiple times) and with only updated drivers + windows updates, mpc-hc and vlc were choppy with 1080p video, but fine with the audio. I installed Haali mkv splitter, and watched the same movies in WMP and WMC and they play fine. I also tried, switching motherboards from gigabyte to asus and upgraded from gtx 260 to 5870. I tried the latest xvideo mpc-hc updates as well. Nothing changed, mpc-hc/vlc were always choppy on 1080p (which is all I have.) I theorize this is because mpc-hc and vlc don't use the Windows APIs for media player priority and bandwidth reservation that WMP/WMC use, and they will never work right until they do. Then again, other people say they have no problem with mpc-hc and vlc, but I'm not sure if those people play 1080p content or not.
 
You're doing something wrong, plain and simple. I have over 200 1080p h264 BD rips in MKV containers and they play perfectly fine in MPC-HC...

Your theory is very wrong. If you have current drivers for your GPU, MPC-HC will use that to decode the video via DXVA. If not, or if the 1080p video was encoded with alot of ref frames, your CPU will decode it.

This stuff isn't rocket science...
 
devil22 said:
I theorize this is because mpc-hc and vlc don't use the Windows APIs for media player priority and bandwidth reservation that WMP/WMC use, and they will never work right until they do. Then again, other people say they have no problem with mpc-hc and vlc, but I'm not sure if those people play 1080p content or not.
Click to expand...
For shits and giggs, I'm going to try playing back some 2K and 4K content in MPC-HC with Haali and the default DXVA H.264 decoder and see if it works...assuming I can actually find a 4K sample (plenty of 2K samples out there). I'm 99% confident that it'll work flawlessly.

EDIT: 2K works great. Video bit rate is 96 MBps. Still looking for a 4K sample to test...
 
Last edited:
How long did you watch the video phide? MPC-HC only stutters once in a while for me, some times within 30 minutes of starting the video, some times in an hour, and also seems correlated to using the computer, i.e. surfing with chrome. I know VLC stutters immediately if I open a chrome window and go to digg.com and open one of the large comment threads and scroll up and down. It's not that mpc-hc can't play hi-def, it just stutters once in a (long) while.
 
devil22 said:
I have the same problem, with no codec packs or splitters installed. I doubt the shark007 codec pack is the problem personally. I reformatted, reinstalled (multiple times) and with only updated drivers + windows updates, mpc-hc and vlc were choppy with 1080p video, but fine with the audio. I installed Haali mkv splitter, and watched the same movies in WMP and WMC and they play fine. I also tried, switching motherboards from gigabyte to asus and upgraded from gtx 260 to 5870. I tried the latest xvideo mpc-hc updates as well. Nothing changed, mpc-hc/vlc were always choppy on 1080p (which is all I have.) I theorize this is because mpc-hc and vlc don't use the Windows APIs for media player priority and bandwidth reservation that WMP/WMC use, and they will never work right until they do. Then again, other people say they have no problem with mpc-hc and vlc, but I'm not sure if those people play 1080p content or not.
Click to expand...

I play only 1080 content with media-player classic HC and i have 0 issues, on a Q8200 (2.33Ghz) stock and a 5770 using Windows 7 x64 and no codecs packs, either out to my CRT 19' 1600 x 1200 or to my 32' Sharp Aquos @ 1080.
 
Uncompressed 4K video runs about 40GB per minute, so even a 15 second clip would be 10GB. HDtimelapse.net apparently has some stock 4K footage that you would have to buy. I can see why nobody is serving it for free on the Internet.
 
i suppose i wasn't particularly clear on this point in my original post, but the specific issue i'm having is with regard to playback via dxva. i can play 1080p content just fine in mpc-hc via software decoding. my quadcore xeon with ht enabled handles it just fine. what i'm interested in doing is offloading the decoding to my gpu, a radeon 5770.

1080p software decoding in mpc-hc = fine
1080p hardware decoding in mph-hc = choppy

the only program with which i've been able to properly utilize dxva is splash. i'd much rather be using mpc-hc as i like the ability to play around with pixel shaders. splash is a newer program which currently lacks such features.

as for shark007's codec pack, why would i need to uninstall it? it allows me to play mkv files in plain 'ol windows media player. actually, i can play absolutely any file format in plain 'ol windows media player and it'll just work. correct me if i'm wrong, but this is not possible with a default windows 7 install. a majority of codecs are pre-existing, and for the most part wmp under win7 works out of the box, but not in every single situation such as is the case with shark007's codec pack.
 
sorry for the double post, but i imagine some might be wondering, "why do you care so much about playing a file in a certain player utilizing a certain decoding method? if it works in plain 'ol wmp, then it ain't broke. don't fix it."

while this is true, the simple fact of the matter is: it just bugs me that i'm having this dxva issue when i know others have it working just fine. so like your typical tweaker, i want to get to the bottom of this.

:D
 
It may be an issue with your ATi drivers or, perhaps, with the card itself. I'm not sure if there could be any other explanation for what you're experiencing.
 
evilsofa said:
There's your problem. Uninstall that. You don't need codec packages for Win7.
Click to expand...
Only about 1/2 of the videos on my Win 7 PC will play without additional codecs installed. Joe Average used to spread this as 'truth', when it's really only 1/2 true. There are still a lot of formats Windows 7 does not support out of the box. The oobe is better, but it's still not perfect.

I am however int he process of converting everything over to formats that work natively with Windows 7.
 
bigdogchris said:
Only about 1/2 of the videos on my Win 7 PC will play without additional codecs installed. Joe Average used to spread this as 'truth', when it's really only 1/2 true. There are still a lot of formats Windows 7 does not support out of the box. The oobe is better, but it's still not perfect.

I am however int he process of converting everything over to formats that work natively with Windows 7.
Click to expand...

Still, never use those horrible codec packs.

Just install what you need separately.
 
Windows 7 Pro here, using MPC-HC (I keep the builds current with releases from xvidvideo.ru) and that's pretty much it: the only (test) file that I haven't been able to play (so far) has been some anime short clip that apparently was encoded using Real Encoder or whatever the hell that POS is.

I snatch HD QuickTime movie trailers from Apple (download with Firefox and a Greasemonkey script) and they play perfectly with MPC-HC/Win7. I've yet to encounter anything that won't play with that combo of app/OS because of Windows 7's multi-format decoders.

I have no clue why other people seem to think they "need" all this garbage software and codecs anymore. Only thing that could potentially improve playback (in my opinion) is either use CoreAVC as the h.264 decoder (the best software based decoder, by far), or having a proper DXVA-capable card which offloads the decoding to the GPU almost completely (DXVA, CUDA, etc).

I've been told that installing Haali's Media Splitter (not a decoder) can actually let you watch h.264 content (usually in the popular MKV container) using Windows Media Player or Media Center. Pretty interesting stuff but, I don't use either app for such purposes, but knowing Windows 7 can cover all that is damned awesome.
 
Jason said:
sorry for the double post, but i imagine some might be wondering, "why do you care so much about playing a file in a certain player utilizing a certain decoding method? if it works in plain 'ol wmp, then it ain't broke. don't fix it."

while this is true, the simple fact of the matter is: it just bugs me that i'm having this dxva issue when i know others have it working just fine. so like your typical tweaker, i want to get to the bottom of this.

:D
Click to expand...

Jason, I had the same problem concerning choppy video playback with my new install of Windows 7 on my i7 860 rig. As Bahamut mentioned installing Haali's Media Splitter is probably a part of the solution to your problem.
The guide below goes into detail on how to get DXVA working on Nvidia and Ati hardware, hope it helps.

http://imouto.my/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/
 
Jason said:
sorry for the double post, but i imagine some might be wondering, "why do you care so much about playing a file in a certain player utilizing a certain decoding method? if it works in plain 'ol wmp, then it ain't broke. don't fix it."
Click to expand...

Because WMP/MC is designed to do some things fairly well, but when you look at how large those apps are in terms of resources, and then you take a look at something like Media Player Classic Home Cinema - a single .exe about ~7-8MB in size - and all the things it's capable of doing (stuff WMP/MC couldn't dream of), well, then it becomes apparent, at least most of us.

MPC and MPC-HC have been my primary video players for years now, and it seems like they just keep improving it, amazingly. I guess the only thing I've wanted them (the developers) to add would be playing videos straight from an ISO as some other players like VLC and MPlayer can do.

It's tiny, it's wicked efficient, and it just gets better all the time. Not much else I can think of... it's not a question of WMP/MC being "broke" at all - they just don't offer the capabilities that MPC-HC does that I want and it provides.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top