MPC-HC for HD Video Playback Guide

[NvIon]

As you all know, the Nvidia Ion chipset's GPU supports full hardware acceleration for offloading the entire decoding process to the GPU. MPC-HC is a freeware, open source media player that has DXVA hardware accelerated decoder that can take full advantage of the Ion GPU to offload the decoding of HD video formats such as H.264 and VC-1 in MKV container format, which is very popular now & MP4 container format. This guide will help you configure MPC-HC to do it, as easy as possible without installing any codecs or other extra software, everything is contained in MPC-HC executable itself.

First you need to download and install the latest DirectX Redist, MPC-HC uses some update runtimes that are not included in any version of Windows including Windows 7.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... ceb6d8fa8d

Now download MPC-HC, you need the 32bit version since Atom N270/N280 only runs 32bit code. I'd suggest download the zip archive and unzipping it, but the installer is fine too if you prefer that.

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/download- ... ic-hc.html

Now after you run MPC-HC, press O to enter Options. Go to Playback, make sure Auto-load subtitles is checked if unchecked. This will enable subtitles for foreign language films if the MKV video has embedded subtitles.

Then go to Output, on XP, select VMR9 Renderless, on Windows 7, EVR Custom Pres is what you should select.

Now go to Internal Filters and make sure Matroska & MP4/MOV is checked in Source Filters. Matroska is the full name of MKV, many just call it MKV for simplicity. In Transform Filters, make sure H264/AVC (DXVA) & VC1 (DXVA) is checked. This makes MPC-HC use its DXVA hardware accelerated decoders.

Go to Subtitles, and set Maximum texture resolution to Desktop and uncheck Round up to power of two. This will give you clear, sharp, crisp subtitles.

And you're done. Now you can enjoy 720P & 1080P H.264 or VC-1 videos on your Mini 311 with the Ion GPU doing all the hard decoding work on the Mini's screen or output it through the HDMI port to a external LCD-TV or LCD PC monitor. Again, no extra codecs or software needed to be installed, everything is in MPC-HC itself.

[MiniKJ]

Maybe this also helps out (or is somehow related?!)

The good news is that Adobe Flash Player will soon support nVidia CUDA technology in the next release the flash will be played through the GPU not the CPU. So Hulu and Youtube HD video should work flawlessly.

Matt at RunCore said this earlier today...

[digimancer]

Maybe this also helps out (or is somehow related?!)

The good news is that Adobe Flash Player will soon support nVidia CUDA technology in the next release the flash will be played through the GPU not the CPU. So Hulu and Youtube HD video should work flawlessly.

Matt at RunCore said this earlier today...

This would be awesome! I <3 Hulu!

[MiniKJ]

Maybe this also helps out (or is somehow related?!)

The good news is that Adobe Flash Player will soon support nVidia CUDA technology in the next release the flash will be played through the GPU not the CPU. So Hulu and Youtube HD video should work flawlessly.

Matt at RunCore said this earlier today...

This would be awesome! I <3 Hulu!

Seems to be official!
http://www.liliputing.com/2009/10/nvidi ... ation.html

[timmeah2001]

my recommendation is:

Media player Classic (home cinema or not doesnt matter just get a stripped one with no filters)
CoreAVC (takes advantage of multi-threading which the atom can actually do 1 core = 2 threads as well as the all important CUDA technology)
AC3Filter (audio filter which i find is most user friendly and customizable)
Haali Media splitter (not aware exactly what it does but i've been told its a good plugin to run)

anyways the above configuration runs any h264 encode, even a 15GB single file 1080p encode running at over 12Mbps with only averaging 30% core usage over both threads. So yeh i highly recommend it... even used to run coreAVC on my old eeepc-9 and managed to get 720p to run on it.

Ohh yes, and i notice that forcing CUDA decoding via coreAVC increases battery life. i dont know about other setups, but ive been able to get through 2 HD movies streaming over wifi on a single battery using my current configuration.

cheers guys, hope it helps.

[solarnoise]

my recommendation is:

Media player Classic (home cinema or not doesnt matter just get a stripped one with no filters)
CoreAVC (takes advantage of multi-threading which the atom can actually do 1 core = 2 threads as well as the all important CUDA technology)
AC3Filter (audio filter which i find is most user friendly and customizable)
Haali Media splitter (not aware exactly what it does but i've been told its a good plugin to run)

anyways the above configuration runs any h264 encode, even a 15GB single file 1080p encode running at over 12Mbps with only averaging 30% core usage over both threads. So yeh i highly recommend it... even used to run coreAVC on my old eeepc-9 and managed to get 720p to run on it.

Ohh yes, and i notice that forcing CUDA decoding via coreAVC increases battery life. i dont know about other setups, but ive been able to get through 2 HD movies streaming over wifi on a single battery using my current configuration.

cheers guys, hope it helps.

Thanks for that grocery list, timmeah =)

I was wondering, would I be fine just using the CCCP codec pack, which I've used for years, or should I cherry-pick my codecs and use the list you have in your post?

I've always used CCCP because it covers practically any odd video format you may run across on the interwebs, with the exception of Indio videos, which you can download the codec for.

I guess if you went with coreAVC, AC3filfer, Haali, ffdshow, and MPC-HC you'd be pretty much all set, huh?

[timmeah2001]

[quote="solarnoise"

I was wondering, would I be fine just using the CCCP codec pack, which I've used for years, or should I cherry-pick my codecs and use the list you have in your post?

I've always used CCCP because it covers practically any odd video format you may run across on the interwebs, with the exception of Indio videos, which you can download the codec for.

I guess if you went with coreAVC, AC3filfer, Haali, ffdshow, and MPC-HC you'd be pretty much all set, huh?[/quote]

I dont know, i guess if it works fine with CCCP mod you should be happy. however coreAVC is a paid codec, and a lot of work between nvidia and corecodecs has been done in optimizing CUDA acceleration. So i'd say go ahead and give it go. All the other filters are free. Having said that there's thousands of torrents out there for coreAVC 1.9.5 (Not that im promoting piracy =) )

[solarnoise]

I want to try out coreAVC, but I don't know which options in CCCP to leave out (I'm terrible at understanding codec packs)

The CCCP options are:
CoreWavPack
FFDShow
FLV Splitter
Haali Media Splitter
MPV (MPEG2) Decoder
VSFilter
Media Player Classic HC

Obviously I want to keep MPC, but what would I turn off out of those that I could use coreAVC for?

[timmeah2001]

in media player classic go to:

Option > External Filters > Then remove the filters that are in there.

This wont delete them, it will just remove them from the listed area and wont force activate them.

Then in the same window Click on Add Filter and add CoreAVC, AC3Filter, Haali media splitter.

Make sure all the Filters/Codecs which you want to use are ticked and set to "Prefer".

This setup works pretty well. It forces all the filters which you have set to "Prefer" when needed. But still falls back to ffdshow or whatever filters you are using when running divx, xvid, *.avi files or formats that are incompatible with the forced codecs.

[solarnoise]

thanks tim, but I don't have any filters to remove in "external filters" in my MPC... and I have CCCP installed.

[solarnoise]

I found the answer to my question in the CCCP wiki

CoreAVC is only for H.264 (advanced video) playback, so the only thing you need to do when installing CCCP is make sure in the settings you set it so that Haali Media Splitter isn't used for H.264, and then CoreAVC will take care of that, and make good use of the CUDA support. Everything else (standard definition) will play through FFDShow and MPC-HC

[NvIon]

Don't use CoreAVC, it cannot play files with 16 reference frames. Stick with the more reliable MPC-HC DXVA decoder that can play files with 16 reference frames. Also don't use Haali Splitter, it's extremely buggy and crashes 1,500 times a day according to Microsoft.

http://lists.matroska.org/pipermail/mat ... 03533.html

Splitter.ax is crashing around 1500 times per day on Windows 7.