pouët.net

RareWtFailWhale: That PDF predates VP3 -- all chips mentioned there belong either to the VP or VP2 generation. And, surprise surprise, the VP2 chips (8400-8700) all offer "H.264 Decode Acceleration with IDCT and CAVLC/CABAC". If Wikipedia is to be trusted, the only difference between VP2 and VP3 is VC-1 acceleration ("The functionality of the H.264-decoding pipeline was left unchanged.").

Your're right. I misread the VC-1 part somehow...

KeyJ: Yeah the feature lists are one thing, whether it actually gets used is another :). I've just never seen it work in practice.

Maybe there's some extra limitations - not full High profile support or something like that? Or my drivers are just too old :)

Anyway, trixter: http://corecodec.com/products/coreavc is $10 well invested if you're working on high-res high-framerate video :)

Just made a new test on this computer (this is with 720p, I have no 1080p content here to test, but will download some). With VLC and GPU accelerated H.264 decoding: 0-1% CPU... without GPU acceleration: 9-10% CPU.

So it seems to work... will try with some 1080p when I have the time... any direct download link for some? Not very big please :-)

Downloaded some from micksam's ftp link above, but those are 1280x720, not 1080p as he claimed (again, 1-3% CPU using VLC's GPU acceleration)

Jcl: I can make some 1080p @ 60 material available to test -- in fact I need to do so anyway to test some more players. But it's 11pm in GMT-6 right now and I need to hit the sack. More tomorrow night.

Not p60 material and a huge download, but a nice movie worth a download anyway: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html
:)

ryg: I have created .ts and .m2ts content and also paid for the coreavc decoder and installed it -- now how do I use it to play the content? vlc uses builtin, powerdvd uses builtin, windows media player won't recognize transport streams. How am I supposed to use coreavc to play back the content?

I usually capture demos at 1080p, so I have a lot of source content laying around. [I rescale the stuff I put on capped.tv] I can probably get some 1080p30 and 1080p60 caps up over the weekend.

trixter: Any DirectShow based player should do (e.g. mplayer2, Media Player Classic or Window Media Player), but I have no experience with WMP whatsoever. The CoreAVC installer normally includes the Haali media splitter which can parse MOV, MP4, Matroska (MKV), Ogg/OGM and MPEG2 TS. If you have that installed, any DShow-based app should be able to play back .ts files.

trixter: what ryg said + if mplayer2/mplayerc/wmp still don't use CoreAVC, it might be because another H.264 decoder is installed and advertises itself with a higher priority ("merit" in DirectShow) than CoreAVC. There are three ways to rectify this:
1. If you have FFDShow installed, open its options window and disable H.264 support there. (FFDShow is notorious for exaggerating its merit value above any reasonable range :)
2. If feasible, uninstall other H.264 decoders.
3. Use a DirectShow merit editor to change the merit values so that CoreAVC has the highest one. This can be done in the "Add Filter" dialog of GraphStudio, for example.

ffdshow was the culprit, thanks for all the help! Unfortunately, while the video now plays with CoreAVC (I can see it as the input/output in GraphStudio), the playback is actually the worst of all players I've tried (it can't really do it at all, about 10fps). It does, however, have the very lowest CPU utilization while playing, so I guess it's doing its job, but it can't play back 1080p @ 60. GPU utilization is at 5%. VLC is doing a much better job on my i7 and uses 20% of the CPU.

I have a GTX 260 (216 core edition) and have a really hard time believing that only 5% of it can help play this file back.

Media Player Classic Homecinema is pretty bad too, it just locks up the picture constantly (like, 2 seconds will go by while it figures out how to catch up).

Okay, transferred my file to the PS3 and *IT* couldn't play it perfectly either. In lower complexity parts, the PS3 played it perfectly; in higher complexity/bitrate parts, it went down to 30fps, and then for the truly tough scenes, it started to drop deblocking and ringing filters to keep up -- that was cool, I wasn't expecting that.

So it looks like 1080p @ 60 is simply not valid (for now).

Before you ask, I created the file using the same vbv/bitrate/etc. settings as I do for my 720p stuff and it verifies bluray authoring so I know the stream is valid.

Trixter - Try CoreAVC with gpu mode off.

Also,

ftp://micksam7.com/demos/asd-the_wind_under_my_wings-1080p60lq.mp4

ftp://micksam7.com/demos/quite-ino-1080p60lq.mp4

These should kill most systems :)

They run fine on my system with coreavc in cpu mode, and work fairly well in ffdshow with the ffmpeg-mt decoder. Chew up near 100% cpu, but they do run without skipping or much skipping.. At least on my somewhat older core2duo @ 3 GHz.

Also I have 1080p caps for agenda circling forth and rove on their prod pages

I can only repeat, try CoreAVC in CPU mode.

I prepared all of the scene.org Awards 2008 (i.e. the ones shown at BP last year) in 1080p60, and we played them back on a quadcore machine without GPU acceleration just fine. There were a couple of frames dropped on Stargazer in the Menger sponge part which has crazy amount of pixel-level detail with an additive noise layer on top, but I don't think anyone except me noticed :)

This year we "downgraded" to 720p because I was extremely busy this spring (BP, master disk deadline at work, and that pesky move the US to take care of) and didn't have time for the extra work that goes into capturing+editing in 1080p. Besides, this year we were back to running inside a demo system instead of last year's all-video solution (very inflexible and the rendering/encoding times were ANNOYING, as was the pipeline). 1080p60 is not a clever idea if the target machine does other rendering :)

I had a play with 1080p60 a year or two back. What I found was that my system would play the files I made perfectly under windows, but dropped frames under OSX. The difference was that GPU accelerated decoding was available on windows (with radeon 2600) but it was pure CPU on OSX (core 2 duo, 2.8ghz).

Can't remember what demo I captured, but I had to use pretty high (40mbit?) bit rates to get good quality.