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Unaccelerated Video Decoding

J

jonnyzero

n00b
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
7
I just built a new machine, Athlon64 3500+, 1G ram, Abit AN8-ultra, BFG 6600GTOC graphics. I love it so far, except when it comes to watching videos. Every time I play a video, even DVDs in PowerDVD, the CPU goes to 100% and even at that the video is jumpy and drops frames or gets out of sync with the audio. This machine ought to be able to decode and play any video I can throw at it by my estimate. My previous machine was a laptop with a mobile athlon64 3200+, 512M ram, and a radeon mobility 9600, and it could handle the exact same decoding tasks with low (<30%) CPU usage without even throttling the CPU above 800Mhz (it can go to 2Ghz). Even an H.264 trailer I rendered on my laptop was fairly smooth, my new machine can only get about 2 frames decoded each second.

Clearly my Nvidia card isn't being used to accelerate the video decoding operation and I'm curious as to why? I have the latest (77.77) Nvidia drivers installed, the OS is WinXPproSP2, so it has the latest version of DirectX installed. What else do I need to do to make sure my video decoding gets hardware accelerated? I don't remember having to do anything on my laptop. Is there some type of software I can use to monitor when the GPU is being used to accelerate decoding, or is the CPU load the best indicator? Could someone help me?
 
Don't you have to use that nVidia software decoder for pure video work? Cost like $20 or something (sorry if I'm way off on the price I'm from the UK)
 
I think that software is just for hi-def videos. I shouldn't need anything special to decode simple DVDs and xvids. Just to test I tried out decoding on an even older computer I have, and Athlon XP 1.13Ghz with a Geforce 3 graphics card, sure enough, it can decode Xvid with <50% CPU usage and decode DVDs in <40% CPU.

Is there some switch in an options dialog somewhere that says: "Make video decoding suck Y/N?" or something like that?
 
I'll try the trial, but then how on earth does my slower computer with a slower nvidia graphics card manage to do the same task? I'm sure the video is being decoded entirely in software, I just can't find the settings I need to change to accelerate it.
 
The NVIDIA decoder will improve your performance watching DVDs. You can download the latestest windows media player which has built in support for purevideo (but that only applies to hi-def wmv files).
 
I tried installing the Nvidia pureview demo, but haven't really noticed any difference. Video decoding is still slightly choppy, and CPU usage is still pegged.

Here are the screenshots that convince me something is wrong, the first is from my laptop and shows low CPU utilization as expected if decoding is being hardware accelerated:

laptop-perf.gif


Now here is my desktop, showing the CPU running at 2.2Ghz frequency and still pegged decoding the same video:

desktop-perf.gif


Yeah, the images are big, but the files aren't.

Any more ideas on how I can force decoding to be hardware accelerated?
 
If you are using Windows Media Player to view DVD's you need to go into the options menu and select the NVIDIA codec.
 
I installed my xvid codec from the k-lite mega codec pack. I uninstalled k-lite and installed the pack you recommended, and sure enough, my xvid decoding is down below 25% CPU utilization. Thanks so much!

Still lousy DVD decoding, I use PowerDVD. I'll keep looking. Thanks.
 
Two Questions 4 U
When you resize the PowerDVD window while playing, does it get worse? Just shrink or stretch the heck outta it, I know it's running bad as it is, but if u can notice it got worse, it is a codec - or overlay acceleration issue

Secondly, did you check the status of your DVD/CD ROM's DMA settings. I know PowerDVD sets that on install, but sometimes even after reboot it may default to PIO causing you pretty bad frame rate while using the DRIVE. If you are using multiple CD Drives, try switching their master/slave settings. Mine would only work with one being master and other set to Cable Select. My Lite-On DVDRW doesn't play nice with other drive.

Thats all I can think of, I'm not sure If I can really fix the codec issue tho ... Also have you tried in 16 bit / 32 bit video modes 2 see if there's anything like that affecting PowerDVD.
 
It might get a little worse when I resize PowerDVD, it's kind of hard to tell, since it's just intermittently choppy and skippy. What bothers me is that I can't watch a DVD while doing anything else because the DVD pegs the CPU to 100% instead of taking a fraction like I'm used to. I have already double-checked that everything is running in DMA, that was one of the first things I did.

The problem is definitely something with using software only codecs, I just didn't expect to have to mess with this stuff and can't really find options for it anywhere, it's all worked so automatically on previous machines. I figured with a faster CPU and graphics card this machine would be so much better, and it is in games. The CPU is even fast enough that software-only decoding is almost good enough if that's all I want to do, but forget playing WoW in a window and watching a movie too like I used to.
 
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