GPU video acceleration made possible by Apple?

davilla Wrote:Nothing you do will enabled VDA decoder on SD sized videos. VDA decoder is coded in XBMC to be used with HD content.

Ahhhh.

Is this a change in the last month or so from the earlier nightlies? That's part of why I spent so much time on this. I'd swear that the re-encoded videos used to be "vda-h264", then a month or so ago I noticed that they no longer were. Eventually I became convinced it was an encoding error.

Is there a discussion somewhere about why this was disabled for SD content? I'd love to read up on the rationale.

dzm06 Wrote:Ahhhh.

Is this a change in the last month or so from the earlier nightlies? That's part of why I spent so much time on this. I'd swear that the re-encoded videos used to be "vda-h264", then a month or so ago I noticed that they no longer were. Eventually I became convinced it was an encoding error.

Is there a discussion somewhere about why this was disabled for SD content? I'd love to read up on the rationale.

At first, anything was h.264 was allowed. Then I re-read the Adobe blog about their experience with VDA decoder and h.264. They don't use VDA for SD content because it's a push in CPU usage.

Then I thought long and hard about what containers have h.264 inside that is SD sized. The result was Xvid and AVI's. Now I really hate AVI's not because it's a crappy container format but because AVI's always seem to be encoded with the most brain dead encoders around with wacky DTS and PTS. Now with VDA decoder, I can only pass one through, that really needs to be PTS in case PTS needs to be re-ordered with does happen with h.264.

Add the above to the fact that VDA decoder is only available on boxes that can run 10.6.3+ AND have nvidia chipsets. Those are all 2.xGHz+ Core2Duo boxes which can easily handle SD h.264 decode with ffmpeg.

Then I disabled SD video content from VDA decoder usage. It was an easy choice.

davilla Wrote:At first, anything was h.264 was allowed. Then I re-read the Adobe blog about their experience with VDA decoder and h.264. They don't use VDA for SD content because it's a push in CPU usage.

Then I thought long and hard about what containers have h.264 inside that is SD sized. The result was Xvid and AVI's. Now I really hate AVI's not because it's a crappy container format but because AVI's always seem to be encoded with the most brain dead encoders around with wacky DTS and PTS. Now with VDA decoder, I can only pass one through, that really needs to be PTS in case PTS needs to be re-ordered with does happen with h.264.

Add the above to the fact that VDA decoder is only available on boxes that can run 10.6.3+ AND have nvidia chipsets. Those are all 2.xGHz+ Core2Duo boxes which can easily handle SD h.264 decode with ffmpeg.

Then I disabled SD video content from VDA decoder usage. It was an easy choice.

Thanks for the context.

It would be fantastic if Dharma would log something to the xbmc.log when this decision is made. That would have saved me a lot of time trying to chase down errors in my re-encoding.

Thanks again!

After thinking about this a bit, I was wondering if you'd be willing to make this a toggle-option ala the "Video post-processing" option of Settings->Video->Playback. This option switches between Disabled, Always, and SD Content. It seems like nearly this same set of choices could work well for VDA:

Allow hardware acceleration (VDADecoder):
Disabled
All content
HD content


The reason I'm hoping for this is that my TV and Mini seem to have a little frame rate syncing issue with some content that led to much "jumping" during pans, and I think that the VDADecoder (yes, even on SD content) helped smooth out the jumping.


Thanks!

dzm06 Wrote:After thinking about this a bit, I was wondering if you'd be willing to make this a toggle-option ala the "Video post-processing" option of Settings->Video->Playback. This option switches between Disabled, Always, and SD Content. It seems like nearly this same set of choices could work well for VDA:

Allow hardware acceleration (VDADecoder):
Disabled
All content
HD content


The reason I'm hoping for this is that my TV and Mini seem to have a little frame rate syncing issue with some content that led to much "jumping" during pans, and I think that the VDADecoder (yes, even on SD content) helped smooth out the jumping.


Thanks!

Dharma GUI is frozen. Perhaps something in advancedsettings.xml would be better. We don't like to complicate the GUI.

davilla Wrote:Dharma GUI is frozen. Perhaps something in advancedsettings.xml would be better. We don't like to complicate the GUI.

That would work quite well.