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+--- Thread: [WINDOWS] GPU assisted video decoding in XBMC for Windows via a custom DXVA renderer? (/showthread.php?tid=33323)
- CrashX - 2009-05-14 23:59
Livin Wrote:that is not integrated, thus not what we are talking about.
What do you mean by not integrated ?
- natethomas - 2009-05-15 01:06
I have to admit, I also don't understand what "integrated" means. At present, NOTHING is integrated into XBMC for GPU decoding on Windows.
Of course, I don't get the point of Crash's initial link either. One should always preface a link with an explanation for the link.
- Rrrr - 2009-05-15 12:18
natethomas Wrote:As to motd2k's point..., good point. It may well be, if this whole Nvidia Ion thing blows up like I hope, that everything we are talking about could be a moot point in about 8 months. You have no idea how excited I would be if we could get the next standard equivalent to the original Xbox. No more hassle. No more thinking. Just pop and go.
I was so hoping it would make it to an appliance type platform rather than 1500 different hardware senarios.
[/quote]Great discussion so far, but can you explain the above please?
natethomas / Geeba:
Why do you hope ION will fail?
Does it complicate things for you?
Is is not a step forward?
Please educate me here.
Furthermore:
I believe that you guys are doing great: there are different market segments for each solution and I believe each segment is big enough.
XBMC Live (embedded) for those who want a simple, but the best, media player appliance and not a one-for-all solution.
XBMC for Windows for those who want more than a media player and are willing to spend more on the OS and hardware.
Integrated GPU acceleration helps to get the hardware costs down and save power, heat thereby bringing cheaper, smaller boxes and more beautiful boxes to the living room.
People are still spending $500+ on a decent player in a nice case and that is too much for accelerated mass adoption.
My believe is that the media player with GPU acceleration will evolve from $200-250 (like Apple TV, but I would like to know other examples) downwards to $100-150 type of set-top box with integrated functionality, but it may take a few more years.
- Geeba - 2009-05-15 13:55
I think you've read my post incorrectly - I hope it DOES take off! 1 hardware platform, multiple OS's - like Xbox (obviously lack of OS support here) but a single hardware platform.
1500 different hardware scenarios ie. "my GFX "XYZ" wont do this".... "my 1866Mhz CAS 9-9-9-24 memory timings are crashing XBMC", "why no support for Fatality sounds cards" I think are a pain in the butt .. but with ION (or similar) it would eliminate alot of this... like your say Apple TV and infact the original xbox.... GPU access was looked into even on this many years ago.
- Rrrr - 2009-05-15 15:00
thank you for the explanation: "blows up" in my understanding was negative
Having read the review of the ION board, it looks like it will not be a good platform for Windows with slow boot, application load times, switching applications, etc...all the Windows (7, forget Vista) associated crap like anti-virus, updates etc will be a PITA.
Let us know if anyone tests it as a dedicated XBMC for Windows media player.
However, for XBMC Live this will be great: cant wait till someone tests it and see if all the components work under XBMC Live (different thread, see XBMC Live).
- CrashX - 2009-05-15 16:12
natethomas Wrote:I have to admit, I also don't understand what "integrated" means. At present, NOTHING is integrated into XBMC for GPU decoding on Windows.
Of course, I don't get the point of Crash's initial link either. One should always preface a link with an explanation for the link.
I posted the link because it is the same topic discussed but has some useful links ..
- Geeba - 2009-05-15 16:13
Hmmm... I'm not so sure... Nvidia have gone out of their way from what I read to get the platform "Windows Certified" With emphasis on Vista Certified...
Windows 7 boots extremely quickly I find and I've run it on single core P4 3Ghz 512Mb machines and it outstrips XP without breaking a sweat...
Just realized a bit off topic... apologies
Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding support in XBMC for Windows - stb831 - 2009-05-22 10:26
hello,
is there a way to get my nvidia card to render any x.264 content under windows xp or win7? Maybe just new CUDA Drivers?
It works with XBMC Líve and Linux, but i would like the same support for windows, because i cant get the network connection to work.
Sorry for my english, thanks stb831
- Gamester17 - 2009-05-22 11:13
No, there is currently no hardware accelerated video decoding support in XBMC for Windows.
Please read the manual, FAQ, and search before posting in the future.
- rcoops - 2009-05-22 11:29
From what I can see i this thread there are a few things to note:
- XBOX is well dead or close to it in regards to video playback capabilities due to it's lack of 1080p playback.
- Apple TV is a cute spin-off but not really the main focus though for now it is worth keeping it alive.
- Linux has some GPU acceleration but this is just for Nvidia cards AMD and others are out in the cold.
- Windows XP, Vista and 7 all have somewhat different ways of working with acceleration of video using DXVA but all of them should have the basic DirectX9.0 options though not ideal there might be some posibilities to get this working.
The main problem with the Windows way of working is the fact that one would need a special build that works just on Windows but would add (some/a lot of) extra code to XBMC that would be useless on the other platforms. On the other hand the Linux acceperation has been added and that seems not to cause to many issues with respect to source bloat for the other platforms.
I would thus suggest to elliminate this as a reason not to bother with DXVA.
The remaining problems are the difficulty of implementing this and having OpenGL ussage at the same time as well and of course the difficulty of working with any Microsoft API when you are not paying them trough the nose for development support (and even then thing are not easy).
The first these two problems could potentially be resolved by moving to DX completely which would make sense on Windows but which would likely mean having to fork XBMC.
The remaining difficulty is how on earth the DX API can be made to offload the video decoding to the GPU. Other open source group(s) seem to have been able to get this working, which means that the information on how to do this is out there. So the XBMC team should/might be able to extract the secrets from the code and or the developers that implemented this in the oter projects.
The main question remaining is if it is worth it splitting XBMC in an attempt to make a Windows version with GPU acceleration for video decoding...
As mentioned before even low end CPU's are powerful enough to do 1080p decoding with windows running so the need to use a GPU for this is getting les and less. Of course for the old P3 and P4 machines that start to sweat when one throws a DVD at them let alone a nice 720p movie these will not be able to playback a 1080p movie. But in all honnesty if an XBOX is not able to do it and people are willing to accept that why should extra efforts be made to have a P3 do this?
Of course if you use less CPU power to do this then you can always do other things with that head room, but lets be honnest how many people are running multiple processor intensive applications in behind their full screen 1080p movie, on a windows box... exactly.
Though GPU based video acceleration would look nice and advanced, looking at the power profile of a GPU compaired to a CPU I would not be surprized to hear that a GPU uses more power when decoding a video stream then a CPU does. So all in all honnesty I would much rather see more sound fixes, improved subtitle handeling, the inclusion of media flags and other misc information in the XBMC database and so on, basically stuff that we can all enjoy rather then expending a huge amount of effort on getting GPU video decoding working under Windows.