H264 codec

Feb 6 2011 7:46am

#1 (permalink)

jb100 Anonymous Visitor

I have been evaluating this very nice software and found it very easy to set up a few satellites on my motorised system. The main issue that would stop me taking it further is inability to handle HD channels. I have specifiied the same codecs I (MS DTV-DVD and AC3filter) used successfully in other apps, but the video seems to be dropping frames (which can be an audio problem), especially in fullscreen mode. I wonder if the program is not selecting EVR as video renderer (there's no option in Settings) as my system needs to use DXVA hardware acceleration. What settings/codecs are required for satisfactory HD operation? My system is Windows 7, 64 bit.

Feb 13 2011 1:17pm

#2 (permalink)

merkin Anonymous Visitor

If you select "attach graph to ROT" in the settings window and register proppage.dll, you can see the graph and filters being used if you open up graphedit and select "connect to remote graph" while you are watching the stuttering video. What video card are you using, intel, ATi, or NVidia? And what series is it? There is no option to select renderer because SichboPVR uses D3d rendering with EVR by default. D3d and video framerates do not play well. Its a double-edge sword. Need a very fast PC for good results. Buried in the advance scan menu is the ability to analyze pids. You can also select individual audio and video pids in this menu and view them. Pid analyze and select video and audio pid and click play. Do you see any framerate issues in this video window? Do you have the same probelm with HD meg2 channels? I hate telling people what codecs to use, but I will tell you what I use. For all mpeg2 content I use elecard. For all mpeg4 content I use MS DTV and Divx. I also use AC3 filter for all audio. Sorry for the late response. Unfortunately I think this is a D3d issue. Are these channels backhauls? If they are 24-hour programming I will try to recreate the issue on my win7 64bit PC, but signal must be strong since recent snow storms knocked everything out of whack. Or you can upload a TS, hit the record button in the pid analysis window. Good Luck

Feb 14 2011 10:26pm

#3 (permalink)

jb100 Anonymous Visitor

I have tried to use GraphEdit with proppage but the only app it will work with is Windows Media Center. Other forums suggest I'm not the first Vista/7 user to find this. Maybe you'll have more luck. The codecs I selected are the MS DTV-DVD ones, which I think are the ones you refer to, with AC3filter for AC3 audio. The PC is an Intel Atom, dual-core at 1.6GHz with NVIDIA ION graphics. The app I was using last night was running an HD channel at around 10% CPU, with DXVA-enabled EVR and using the above codecs. The only other apps I have had HD problems with are Windows Media Centre (an audio issue - fixed by disabling multi-channel sound) and Alt-DVB, which is pre-Vista. I'm afraid I can't get the PID preview to run. On clicking, the Play button changes momentarily to a Stop one then back to Play again. All the HD channels I have tried would have been either 50 (1280 x 720) or 25 fps (1440 or 1920 x 1088), with H264 video (though, confusingly, the scan PIDs call these "MPEG2Video" while the same ones are listed as "H264Video" on the scanner's Channel List tab). As far as I'm aware, there are no MPEG2 HD channels available to me (going by the European definition of HD). The channels are standard FTA broadcasts.

Feb 19 2011 4:48am

#4 (permalink)

Sichbo Administrator

Hey JB The app is hardcoded to always use dxva2 + EVR on vista/win7 OSes. I have the same win7 dtv decoder+ac3 filter as you, but it seems to be playing 1440x1088 h264 (as well as a 1080i mpeg2 on a different clear promo channel) with ~10% cpu. Not sure what could be causing playback issues on the Atom/ION hardware right off the bat. There's not much I can do without your same hardware on hand.. dxva2 is pretty hard to screw up from an application perspective, if DXVA2CreateDirect3DDeviceManager9 didn't succeed, you'd have no video at all (black screen). If MR_VIDEO_ACCELERATION_SERVICE service is never requested of SichboPVR by the video decoder, then that would tell us if you're actually getting dxva2 acceleration initialized; however, in my experience this service request is only omitted by the odd-ball 3rd party decoders. The MS DTV decoder always grabs the service from me 100% of the time on my tests. Maybe I'll stick a little "DVXA2" glyph on the OSD when acceleration is present.. that way you'd know for sure. The raw pid scanner/finder is simply looking for intact sequence start codes (indicating a non-scrambled video feed of *some kind*), so just ignore what the label is. h264/mpeg2 both have the same picture start code 0x00001e, and for performance I don't bother analyzing further than that on the analyzer tool. My source/demux filter figures out the true video format during playback, the channel config makes no difference to it either way. Thanks for giving it a go anyway.

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