PowerDVD and H.264

[doncote0]

I currently have PowerDVD 8 Ultra to PowerDVD 8 Ultra build 2051 and am considering patching it.

The patch is PowerDVD 8 Ultra to PowerDVD 8 Ultra build 3017 and it says it now supports Blu-Ray in clone mode on Vista or later.

That is nice but I have XP.

What versions of Cyberlink PowerDVD support H.264 playback from outside of the Cyberlink app? In otherwords, what versions of Cyberlink software allow playing H.264 from the included native codec (so I can use it in Sage)?

I have seen and heard many horror stories, but none of them seem easy to find. Please let me know of your experiences with Cyberlink PowerDVD and H.264.

Thank You.

[Taddeusz]

AFAIK, patch 2217 was the last patch for 8 Ultra that allowed external use of the dshow filters. Every patch after that disables the H.264 filter.

I actually gave up on the Cyberlink filters after discovering that their H.264 filter doesn't report 1080p H.264 videos properly. Due to the fact that both numbers are evenly divisible by 16 1080p H.264 is actually encoded as 1920x1088. The decoder is then supposed to crop out the last 8 lines and display it as 1920x1080. The issue with the Cyberlink H.264 decoder is that it does the cropping then reports the resolution incorrectly as 1920x1088. Apparently this only happens outside of PowerDVD. As a result you end up with 8 doubled horizontal lines on the screen and visually diagonals on the screen will have odd "jaggies" in them.

Since moving to Windows 7 I only use my PowerDVD 8 Ultra for Blu-ray playback and use the built-in Win7 video decoders for everything else. Works quite well.

[doncote0]

I have had no problems with H.264 files, but I have not viewed them in the native format. I'll have to test this.

[Taddeusz]

For me the problem came up from transcoding m2ts sources for lighter storage.