Yet another mkv help request.

[Eleint]

I'm having some issues playing back a particular video file, Video drops frames in VLC, presumably due to processor constraints, and unoptimized decoding. As a next step I installed mplayer, without any standalone codec packs. This resulted in no video being played back at all. Further research suggested it might be an AVC codec, and I ended up downloading and installing the current CCCP package. Now the video and sound play back fine, but asynchronously. My sound is about 2 or 3 seconds behind.

CCCPi Test render output for file in question:

File: C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew J. Hyndman\Desktop\refined-bar-blu1080p.mkv

Filter 0: Default DirectSound Device
Filename: C:\WINDOWS\system32\quartz.dll
Filter CRC: 6E9A054C
Date: 2009-06-03 | 14:27:58
Filter 1: Video Renderer
Filename: C:\WINDOWS\system32\quartz.dll
Filter CRC: 6E9A054C
Date: 2009-06-03 | 14:27:58
Filter 2: ffdshow Audio Decoder
Filename: C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\FFDShow\ffdshow.ax
Filter CRC: 4917B290
Date: 2009-08-30 | 22:14:16
Filter 3: DirectVobSub (auto-loading version)
Filename: C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\VSFilter.dll
Filter CRC: B787032D
Date: 2009-08-30 | 23:51:48
Filter 4: ffdshow Video Decoder
Filename: C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\FFDShow\ffdshow.ax
Filter CRC: 4917B290
Date: 2009-08-30 | 22:14:16
Filter 5: C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew J. Hyndman\Desktop\refined-bar-blu1080p.mkv
Filename: C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\Haali\splitter.ax
Filter CRC: 125697A6
Date: 2009-03-24 | 21:32:24

[BradF]

Its gotta be a hardware bottle neck. What are your specs? If you have a somewhat newish Video Card you can have that doing all the decoding for you or atleast lessen the load on your CPU.
Check this out - I can watch 720/1080P .mkv's with almost zero CPU utilization doing this.

Most players will prioritize video/sound differently so with the lack of synchronization this tells you it can't handle the video + sound with current settings. I can tell by your post you assumed this from the start just rehashing.

[SeijiSensei]

Mplayer by itself isn't the easiest program to work with. Have you tried the Windows version of smplayer? It's self-contained and doesn't use DirectShow codecs like those in CCCP, so it can coexist with other players/codecs. The maintainer for smplayer keeps up with recent code changes in mplayer as well, so the mplayer binary that's included with smplayer is always pretty up-to-date.

[Eleint]

PC's a couple years old,
Specs:
CPU: Intel Core Duo T2500 2.0 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 7600 Go
RAM: 2.99 GB

I don't know what else is material to the discussion, I'm attempting to play back on an external 23" monitor at full 1080 resolution.

Actually, I guess I do have smplayer installed, not the base mplayer code, as I probably implied.



Thank you both, very pertinent comments, that linked article about GPU accelaration sounds like what I want to be doing.
Am I wrong, or are smplayer and MPC Home Cinema the same thing? When I load up smplayer, it looks like this on the title bar:



I read through most of that article, and switched the options for Matroska and the H264 codecs to internal. I still seem to end up with no notable performance improvement. CPU usage is still maxing out.

This file is definitely utilizing H264 video codecs, right? Was there another option besides using the internal filters to enable GPU acceleration? Do only some versions of smplayer/mpc home cinema support GPU acceleration? I noticed in the article he suggests 8 series or newer for GeForce graphics cards, is my card too old for the feature?

Anyway, thanks for the help.

[emptyeighty]

I don't think the 7xxx series supports GPU acceleration.

You can try the following: Make sure you have the 2009-09-09 CCCP. Go to CCCP's start menu entry -> settings, 2nd page, do a reset settings and re-register filters. After you've done that return to settings, 1st page, and check the box that says "MT" right next to "H.264". That will enable ffdshow multithreading for H.264, resulting in a speed boost by using both of your CPU's cores. Make sure you use CCCP's MPC when testing. Does this help?

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Eleint

Am I wrong, or are smplayer and MPC Home Cinema the same thing? When I load up smplayer, it looks like this on the title bar

No, they're not the same at all. Did you install the version at smplayer.sourceforge.net? Here's the current Windows version: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/smp....6.8-win32.exe

I don't know where you obtained your copy of smplayer, but I only install open-sourced programs from known and trusted locations or from the original developer's site itself. I almost never trust third-party download sites with a couple of well-known exceptions like download.com. In this regard, Windows users probably have a tougher problem than Linux users like me. Mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora maintain "repositories" containing endorsed copies of thousands of free software programs. We also have the option of building programs from source, which I do routinely for some programs like mplayer to ensure I have the latest feature set.

[TCman]

Originally Posted by Eleint

PC's a couple years old,
Specs:
CPU: Intel Core Duo T2500 2.0 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 7600 Go
RAM: 2.99 GB

I don't know what else is material to the discussion, I'm attempting to play back on an external 23" monitor at full 1080 resolution.

Actually, I guess I do have smplayer installed, not the base mplayer code, as I probably implied.



Thank you both, very pertinent comments, that linked article about GPU accelaration sounds like what I want to be doing.
Am I wrong, or are smplayer and MPC Home Cinema the same thing? When I load up smplayer, it looks like this on the title bar:



I read through most of that article, and switched the options for Matroska and the H264 codecs to internal. I still seem to end up with no notable performance improvement. CPU usage is still maxing out.

This file is definitely utilizing H264 video codecs, right? Was there another option besides using the internal filters to enable GPU acceleration? Do only some versions of smplayer/mpc home cinema support GPU acceleration? I noticed in the article he suggests 8 series or newer for GeForce graphics cards, is my card too old for the feature?

Anyway, thanks for the help.

Hi,

with that system specs you should be able to playback 1080p videos;

Try to check what background programs are running and also check for virusses etc.

I don't know whether the geforce go 7600 has dedicated videomemory (probably it has) or has to share memory with the system memory, but if you have 256MB videomemory you should be fine; if you have to share the memory, then maybe check whether you can increase the video shared memory.

As for the codec pack, I think the K-lite megacodec is a bit better since the newest version already has integrated Divx7 h.264 encoder in the codec pack which supports multi-threading and SSE which should boost H.264 video playback significantly. Also Divx 7 h.264 seems to be faster at h.264 decoding than CoreAVC (CUDA disabled of course) when a core 2 duo/core duo system is used.

If I am right the MediaPlayerClassic HomeCinema only support video acceleration via DXVA for the newer generation videocards, that's from the nVidia's Geforce 8000 series or higher and ATI's HD2000 series or higher*.

Hope this can help you a bit,

Good luck!

[BradF]

Originally Posted by Eleint

PC's a couple years old,
Specs:
CPU: Intel Core Duo T2500 2.0 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 7600 Go
RAM: 2.99 GB

I don't know what else is material to the discussion, I'm attempting to play back on an external 23" monitor at full 1080 resolution.

Actually, I guess I do have smplayer installed, not the base mplayer code, as I probably implied.



Thank you both, very pertinent comments, that linked article about GPU accelaration sounds like what I want to be doing.
Am I wrong, or are smplayer and MPC Home Cinema the same thing? When I load up smplayer, it looks like this on the title bar:



I read through most of that article, and switched the options for Matroska and the H264 codecs to internal. I still seem to end up with no notable performance improvement. CPU usage is still maxing out.

This file is definitely utilizing H264 video codecs, right? Was there another option besides using the internal filters to enable GPU acceleration? Do only some versions of smplayer/mpc home cinema support GPU acceleration? I noticed in the article he suggests 8 series or newer for GeForce graphics cards, is my card too old for the feature?

Anyway, thanks for the help.

Have task manger up then playback the video. If it hits 100% at any time this is were you should notice sound de synchronization. Those spec's are fine for 720P but pushing it slightly for 1080 in my honest opinion.

A newer ATI/Nivdia video card can be had for cheap. 4650 is under 100 bucks and allows no more then 1-10% CPU usage during 720/1080 playback for me.

[Eleint]

Thanks again for the responses:

seijisensei:
You're right, I'm just an idiot. I have both, but I had installed smplayer and then run media player classic home cinema from some older installation. And yes, I'm very familiar with sourceforge; that's exactly where I downloaded it from.

TCman:
Yes, the card does have 256 MB dedicated video memory. I'll have to look into that K-lite codec set.

BradF:
Yes, when I attempt playback, my CPU usage hovers around 80-100% on both cores. Curiously the sound desynchronization is pretty constant, it doesn't "lag" or break up for the most part, it's just a few seconds off of the video (non-constant offset on repeated playtests), and actually, it appears to be ahead of the video playback. I am still dropping frames occasionally, so maybe the sound is higher prioritized, I don't know.

I can definitely play back 1080p videos with different compression formats, I watch Blu-Rays without issue, and I have a couple wmv and quicktime files that playback fine.

I actually am running a laptop system, or I'd definitely consider upgrading the video card, too. :/


I just now attempted playing this video file in smplayer. Without changing any settings, I get no picture, but CPU usage is high. Bizarrely, as I switched back to this page to write this down, in the screenshots above, only the segment where the picture from the original frame was caught I DO SEE the video (very laggy) playing back. I wish I had a camcorder so I could show you what it looks like, very weird.

Anyhow, I'll look into the K-lite codecs, it sounds like I can't use my GPU to accelerate the decoding, and my specs are just borderline for 1080p content, so thanks all again, and happy holidays.

[BradF]

Originally Posted by Eleint

BradF:
Yes, when I attempt playback, my CPU usage hovers around 80-100% on both cores. Curiously the sound desynchronization is pretty constant, it doesn't "lag" or break up for the most part, it's just a few seconds off of the video (non-constant offset on repeated playtests), and actually, it appears to be ahead of the video playback. I am still dropping frames occasionally, so maybe the sound is higher prioritized, I don't know.

I can definitely play back 1080p videos with different compression formats, I watch Blu-Rays without issue, and I have a couple wmv and quicktime files that playback fine.

I actually am running a laptop system, or I'd definitely consider upgrading the video card, too. :/


I just now attempted playing this video file in smplayer. Without changing any settings, I get no picture, but CPU usage is high. Bizarrely, as I switched back to this page to write this down, in the screenshots above, only the segment where the picture from the original frame was caught I DO SEE the video (very laggy) playing back. I wish I had a camcorder so I could show you what it looks like, very weird.

Anyhow, I'll look into the K-lite codecs, it sounds like I can't use my GPU to accelerate the decoding, and my specs are just borderline for 1080p content, so thanks all again, and happy holidays.

Task manager isn't to the teeth accurate but gives you a idea. Your system is up to snuff for 1080P in the less strain codec's/un-compressed but .mkv (H.264) 1080 is a tough one.

For example I used to run 720p on a athlon XP (ugh) and I hovered around 80-90% and intense moments it may jump to 100%. I'd notice sound de synchronization randomly. What I can recommend is if your playing this back on a smaller then 30 inch screen just go with 720P (If applicable), if your close to the screen you should not notice a difference. Especially if you watching it on your laptops native display and not out sourcing it to a large display.