Comments on: Use Windows 7′s built-in h.264 decoder in Media Player Classic Homecinema

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:43:01 +0000

Already got ‘em, thanks.

I’d also like to mention that recent NVIDIA drivers (starting around the 256 series) as well as CyberLink PowerDVD 10 is able to give me adequate performance for playing back high-bitrate h.264 content on my poor laptop. CoreAVC 2.0, while it fixes the issues described in this post, is slower than CoreAVC 1.x and does not provide adequate performance. Windows’s built-in DXVA-capable codec is still the second-best solution that I can find.

By: Up to date

Up to date — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:31:29 +0000

Aaron, new WHQL drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-260.89-whql-driver.html

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:16:28 +0000

Hi, thanks for the update, but I get update notifications about both of these pieces of software now and I’ve already installed them both. (Just got the new drivers a couple hours ago.)

Blog post about my new software notification system coming soon-ish (within the next month or so).

By: Up to date

Up to date — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:03:30 +0000

Aaron, new WHQL drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-257.21-whql-driver.html

Please also install the latest DirectX End-User Runtimes June 2010, it’s required for the latest MPC-HC builds.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d&displaylang=en

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:09:18 +0000

I had that enabled already, actually…
If the bitrate is high enough (like that of a Blu-ray disc), 1080p content still does not play smoothly with libavcodec/ffdshow/CCCP. (Same story on Windows and Linux.)

This is just on my laptop (which is my main personal machine), which has an Intel Core 2 Duo as I mentioned before. I tried it on a dual quad-core Xeon machine and it worked fine.

I’ve been meaning to make a follow-up post to this since a few things have happened, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, so I’ll briefly summarize here:

* I’ve gotten DXVA to play back the high-bitrate h.264 at full speed. However, I have a few videos (not from Blu-ray) that DXVA seems to disagree with.
* CoreAVC 2.0 is out, and while they fixed my decoding error, I find that it requires more CPU than 1.9.5, so videos don’t play smoothly anymore. A quick look at their forums reveals that I’m not the only one this happened to.

By: creamyhorror

creamyhorror — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:27:21 +0000

“However, I find that libavcodec is not fast enough to decode high-bitrate h.264 content in real-time on my machine (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo)”

Not really. That’s because by default only single-threaded decoding is enabled in CCCP. Your machine is perfectly capable of decoding 1080p content; you just need to enable multithreaded decoding under CCCP Settings (check the “MT” box next to the H.264 box). No need to futz around with alternatives.

By: fugo

fugo — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:14:08 +0000

cheers man this helped me out

By: Up to Date

Up to Date — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:30:09 +0000

Aaron, new WHQL drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_x64_195.62_whql.html

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:32:40 +0000

Skipping this one… caused my “resume from sleep” failure to return. :-\

By: Up to Date

Up to Date — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:16:01 +0000

Aaron, new Nvidia Win7 drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_winvista_win7_x64_195.55.html