Solved Issue 10-bit h264 (Hi10) Support?

LAV filters play 10-bit flawlessly, have HW support, and are created by XBMC commiters AFAIK...

psorcerer Wrote:LAV filters play 10-bit flawlessly, have HW support, and are created by XBMC commiters AFAIK...

Thats odd, because it doesnt seem to do a damn thing for me.

psorcerer Wrote:LAV filters play 10-bit flawlessly, have HW support, and are created by XBMC commiters AFAIK...

I'm pretty sure it doesn't do HW acceleration of 10-bit decoding.


And that reminds me that bringing Hi10p into the XBMC fold probably isn't going to be as trivial as just patching in the new ffmpeg like I thought. It's probably going to need some kind of logic to check the file first to see if it's 10-bit, and if it is, select a software decoder, and if it's not, select hardware decoding.

I have to do this now manually anytime I try to play something in mplayer, and it's absolutely obnoxious. This stuff got pushed out without even thinking of (or caring about) the consequences.

jwcalla Wrote:I'm pretty sure it doesn't do HW acceleration of 10-bit decoding.

Afaik it uses shaders for most of computation work. Not sure how much more efficient (heat) it is when compared to CPU only computation.

jwcalla Wrote:And that reminds me that bringing Hi10p into the XBMC fold probably isn't going to be as trivial as just patching in the new ffmpeg like I thought. It's probably going to need some kind of logic to check the file first to see if it's 10-bit, and if it is, select a software decoder, and if it's not, select hardware decoding.

I have to do this now manually anytime I try to play something in mplayer, and it's absolutely obnoxious. This stuff got pushed out without even thinking of (or caring about) the consequences.

Up to now Hi10P is almost Anime only feature, so no one will care about such switch, i guess . You can run in CPU only mode with Hi10P (when new ffmpeg is added) or DXVA with artifacts like now.

Question:
It seems the content its testing on is Anime(cartoons) which is going to get best compression of all media, right?
Has any one testing this by ripping Matrix or Fast & Furious (something with a lot of action on the screen)? Is the compression and CPU usage still justifying this?

bambi73 Wrote:Afaik it uses shaders for most of computation work. Not sure how much more efficient (heat) it is when compared to CPU only computation.

The LAV Video decoder just uses FFmpeg and as such is software only. The LAV CUVID Decoder uses the NVidia decoder accessible through CUDA (which is afaik internally actually the same decoder also accessible through DXVA).

And as of now, none of these hardware decoder can decode 10-bit h264.

As long as the 10-bit support is really included in the next release, I am fine. I don't use DXVA anyways (GF 570) due to FF video and RW video not running as smoothly as in CPU only mode. At least on my Win 7 setup.

atari800 Wrote:Question:
It seems the content its testing on is Anime(cartoons) which is going to get best compression of all media, right?
Has any one testing this by ripping Matrix or Fast & Furious (something with a lot of action on the screen)? Is the compression and CPU usage still justifying this?

The only real reason I see people in the anime communities jumping all over it is because it will allow for a slight drop in file size, good when youre sharing a dozen 720p shows every week, and how well it addresses color banding which is more noticeable in animation than anything else. After first reading about it I started noticing the banding in every animation I watch now. It sucks but it doesnt bother me (and Im sure most other people) enough to outweigh the issues encoding everything into a new format brings. Ontop of that, the only reason you really get banding is because the bitrate is so much lower than the source just so the file size is reasonable to distribute online. If these people really cared more about quality over getting things for free they would just buy the media from the source, ie Blu-ray.

This is personally why I dont care in the end that it isnt supported and Im happy waiting until hardware decoding comes around to do it. It would be nice to have it in XBMC, even if it is just software decoding, for the compatibility. But such groups as these obviously dont care about compatibility and never have. This has always been an issue with them and this is just another example of it, as long as it runs fine on their machines to hell with everyone else, its not their problem. I have run into this time and time again with "their" content as Ive been watching fansubs since the 90s, even with that new-fangled codec called DivX.

CharredChar Wrote:But such groups as these obviously dont care about compatibility and never have. This has always been an issue with them and this is just another example of it, as long as it runs fine on their machines to hell with everyone else, its not their problem. I have run into this time and time again with "their" content as Ive been watching fansubs since the 90s, even with that new-fangled codec called DivX.

Yup, you just hit it out of the park.

I get the impression that many of them are just trying to one-up each other and show themselves off, and once one of them dropped the hammer with 10-bit, the whole line of them followed suit like dominoes. It's clear that they marched forward on this with absolutely no understanding of the technical side of this decision, evidenced by such brilliant recommendations like, "Well, CCCP is putting out a beta next week to support 10-bit, so that should solve everyone's problems." lol

On the Doki website I tried to impress that there are a whole slew of people out there that actually play media on HTPCs (low-end purpose-built boxes like the Zotac IONs, etc. that depend on HW acceleration) that are going to be totally left out by this switchover. The typical response was, "You must have old hardware. It works fine on my laptop." lol x 2

(BTW I am able to play 10-bit 720p on my 2 x 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron, but 10-bit 1080p absolutely chokes the system. Meanwhile 8-bit 1080p plays flawlessly w/o HW decoding. So this 10-bit is going to add significant processing requirements in addition to losing HW acceleration.)

Unfortunately the new Anime season about to start and a lot of fansub groups are changing over completely to 10-bit (it's their prerogative, no matter how stupid an idea - some are even refusing to label them as 10-bit ...).

I would really appreciate integration of the latest ffmpeg into pre-Eden to get 10-bit, knowing that it will increase the CPU requirements greatly.

There is a workaround at the moment, and that is to reencode with Handbrake or similar tools to 8-bit. Not the best solution though IMO.