[WINDOWS] Experimental H.264 DXVA2 hardware acceleration support with Intel GPUs

That previous one didn't solve the issue. I posted a new candidate here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=104863

Pentium G6950 (of the i3 family really, the smaller cousin of i3-540) has bad video problems with DXVA2 (often fine but just as often extreme stuttering, pixelation, and strange colors). MKV/x.264+AC3 file downloaded from somewhere, made by very experienced ripper.. Works nicely without DXVA2 (and also in MPC-HC with DXVA via MS-DTV codec, I wish I could use that in XBMC; the internal DXVA/h.264 codec in MPC-HC is also crap but exchangeable).

Solution is to switch off DXVA2. Since XBMC consumes 20% CPU idle and 15% when playing an SD h.264 rip, the idle consumption most often is more of a problem anyway.

I don't think the statement "Hardware-accelerated playback of H.264 material was fixed today in ffmpeg for Intel GPUs (patch originally from VLC..)" holds water. Besides, VLC never had any HW acc support, only "experimental", which I tried and that sure doesn't work. The only 3 codecs that work on i3 etc are MS-DTV, DivX and Cyberlink. Since they are proprietary I suppose the can't be included? But MS-DTV is already present on Win7 machines, couldn't you make it use this if it's already on the PC? Don't know why you necessarily must come up with your own codec when it's already preinstalled and for free on 9½ of 10 PCs.

Edit: also tried an i3-540 CPU now, same problem with DXVA2, but CPU usage is down to 5%.

DavidGGG Wrote:Don't know why you necessarily must come up with your own codec when it's already preinstalled and for free on 9½ of 10 PCs.

MSDTV isn't open source and I don't think there's any documentation available ? It's commercial & microsoft copyrighted I think ? Hence it won't play on anything else than windows.

Besides, it's not the codec here that's the problem. DXVA is just a wrapper that uses a decoder that is in your hardware. The problem is in the configuration of the whole process and 'interfacing' it with XBMC. So MSDTV wouldn't make any difference, because in both cases the codec has to be configured correctly, which exactly is the problem here (though it's possible that the configuration happens a level higher, *in* that msdtv dll, dunno about that, like said it's not open source AFAIK).

I fixed all issue's in DXVA-FFMPEG that occured in my movies (my patches are included in the isidrogar's build, one for MPEG2 and one for VC1). I don't have a sandybridge, so it's too complicated to debug/fix this for me, somebody with Sandybridge should do it ...Besides, like said, everything plays fine now on ATI and NVIDIA (and please remember/understand, nobody here gets paid, we're just doing things because we enjoy it, so you'll probably have to wait till somebody with an intel Sandybridge chipset gets so fed up with this bug, that he's going to want to fix it ).