[dustobub]

I can possibly make a sample later, but I'm tied up right now. I think that all WMV-HD stuff is VC1, but the clips I am using are remuxed HDDVD in Matroska.

[tslayer]

Ya, I decided to scrap my on-board video and get an NVIDIA 8600 GT (Fanless). But the audio is onboard. The onboard video was 7050.

[dustobub]

Remuxed Erin Brokovich HD DVD VC1 plays with artifacts for 20 seconds and then hangs XBMC.

[dustobub]

Remuxed A Scanner Darkly Bluray VC1 plays with artifacts, but has not hung yet.

[BLKMGK]

Remuxed Erin Brokovich HD DVD VC1 plays with artifacts for 20 seconds and then hangs XBMC.

I've been spending a TON of time figuring out how to get HD-DVD into something more reasonably sized and playable. I believe I've found a goodprocess for VC-1 and I think I'll have H.264 here soon. HOW exactly are you processing the video that's giving you problems? Unlike with DVD where there's lots of one button push tools HD-DVD processing is still a pile of tools and work so there's lots of room for errors.

Most of what I've learned has come from this thread. Gotten lots of help from others and slowly puzzling this out. I watched a piece of compressed HD-DVd earlier today, a trailer, and it came out great! Now I'm doing the full feature, Transformers, so we'll see how that works - in about 13 hours

[BLKMGK]

Gah, didn't see some of the other responses prior to your's and there's no edit I do also have a redone VC-1 clip but I think I chose x.264 for it. I'll try the birds clip myself, I agree that was INSANE! I smacked my CPU pretty hard with the x.264 trailer I've got but it didn't drop many frames. Multithread on that would be pretty nice too.

[dustobub]

Google eac3to, it is an amazing application. It can to HDDVD -> mkv (no transcoding, lossless), and can decode/re-encode all surround formats. I've been taking all of my HDDVDs and remuxing them into mkv with the sound track encoded as 5.1 flac. This way any player on any platform can play the movie at full bitrate/resolution/audio.

[BLKMGK]

Google eac3to, it is an amazing application. It can to HDDVD -> mkv (no transcoding, lossless), and can decode/re-encode all surround formats. I've been taking all of my HDDVDs and remuxing them into mkv with the sound track encoded as 5.1 flac. This way any player on any platform can play the movie at full bitrate/resolution/audio.

Oh yes, I know about eac3to! However I'm willing to compress these some as 20+Gig per movie is a bit sick. I'd be interested in the commandline you use however if you wouldn't mind PM'ing it to me to keep this thread clean. I've not tried FLAC, I'm using AC3 reduced to 640 (-640). Eac3to appears to be VERY powerful!

I'd also be interested in how these uncompressed movies are playing back for you other than the two above. I'm playing back the big monkey movie right now and have dropped something like 420 frames so far. Not too bad though IMO. That movie was VC-1 I think before I compressed with x.264, the big robot movie was H.264 and is compressing now - should be about 11Gigs. I am preparing to do Breakfast Club, it is VC-1 and I will be looking to keep it uncompressed (15Gigs off the disk w/out sound). I figure this will be a good one to play to test the VC-1 playback as requested - seems I deleted the bird scene:mad: I think there's a 3rd encoding allowed by the standard but I've yet to see it.

Right now my decoding appears to be occurring on just one core. I'll do an update just as soon as the King takes a fall. I compressed down the Ironman trailer from Transformers as a test and it taxes my system pretty hard right now, I'll be thrilled if that has been improved upon. FWIW it played back better in XBMC than it did on my Vista 64 box running a 4Ghz CPU and VLC.

P.S. There's a REALLY good Wikipedia page on eac3to that was deleted. It's in the Google cache so if anyone wants to learn about it without reading the Doom9 thread that's a good starting place.

[BLKMGK]

Okay, for .264 playback the new changes are AWESOME! I had played King Kong earlier and seen some dropped frames here and there. I didn't play it all the way through yet with the new code but I can already tell it will be much better. It looks like both cores are being used on mine too and I did nothing special when it was compressed. Very very happy with these changes, for this CODEC they seem to improve things a good bit. I played back a trailer I'd done before that was shorter and it didn't drop a single frame, very very nice.

It was asked that we play some VC-1 content. I've got one muxing now that I'm going to try with a FLAC encoded sound track. It's Evan Almighty and I'll try it out in the morning, I may have Transformers done then too. Evan will be uncompressed from it's original form - video and audio pulled via eac3to and muxed with MKVMERGE. I'll report back on that as soon as I can but as of right now I'm 100% thrilled with the improvements in .264 playback. Very nice guys!!

[BLKMGK]

Okay, some results. The X.264 encode I did of the big robot movie is pretty awesome! Unfortunately not far into it XBMC cored, doh! I also tried the VC-1 version of Evan Almighty. I didn't go very far into it though as it was dropping frames constantly even through the initial opening screens.

At this point I chose to reboot and crank my 2.66Ghz C2D to 3Ghz. I also accepted an X update for Ubuntu prior to rebooting. When I played Evan this time it was smooth as silk! Unfortunately I had no sound! Stranger still I had no sound when I switched my stereo over to another input. Not sure what occurred but I had to completely power down my stereo to get sound on any input. Ubuntu though still refuses to play any sound via Coax and it's not just XBMC either. I'm not sure what's occurred, might be the X update, migh tbe something dorked with the stereo, who knows? <sigh> Slowing the CPU to stock changed nothing.

In any case I'm not sure what VC-1 processing required prior to this last round of changes so I cannot say if they helped or hurt VC-1 playback. I can say that it looks like about 3Ghz is going to be required for playing back this particular HD-DVD it seems, at least the intitial screens of it. X.264 playback is pretty awesome although my source has been compressed some. I might try putting together one without further compression to see how it plays once my sound is back just to test.

Hope that helps some. I believe I'm on build 1699, updated this morning.

[BLKMGK]

Anyone seeing red, blue and sometimes white lines in VC-1 playback? I see it mostly in dark scenes. I am not yet sure if it's the video or the decoding but my HD-DVd rips are being moved straight into MKV with eac3to - no compression. I will try to test the video in other players but watching a vid now that I know is H.264 encoded (Transformers) it's PERFECT. Riddick and Tomb Raider both show up slightly buggered, pretty sure they are VC-1. No issues with dropped frames at least.

[pike]

VC-1 issues are most likely due to the "cabac patch", wonder if it's possible to disable the patch for VC-1 ?

[BLKMGK]

VC-1 issues are most likely due to the "cabac patch", wonder if it's possible to disable the patch for VC-1 ?

I will try transcoding one of the problem vids into H.264 and see if the issue goes away as well as trying it in another player. I will make sure these are VC-1 too, I'm positive at least one is but I'll try to verify that the issue follows VC-1. So far Transformers has been the only movie I've got that is native H.264.

[BLKMGK]

Okay, looks like it's just VC-1. H/264 vids are fine, damned good looking too. If there's anything I can do to help troubleshoot this etc. let me know. Not seeing this CODEC used anywhere but HD-DVd, maybe Blu-Ray.

[dustobub]

Yeah, it's the same problem I noted earlier in this thread. It actually isn't just cosmetic, some of my VC1 videos actually crash XBMC. I am going to download the XXL build of FFDShow and see if the problem exists there, it should, as they are both using the cabac patch.

Dustin