The state of H.264 decoders

[martincmartin]

So, here's my experience with H.264 decoders, the ones mentioned in this thread:

DivX: Works pretty well, although I get occasional error messages or crashes during FF/Rew. A pain for me, and hurts the WAF*.
CyberLink: The latest releases don't let the decoder be used with DirectShow and therefore SageTV.
ArcSoft: Same.
CoreAVC: I can't find a trial version, so I spend $10 on the full version. On 1080i video, it plays back at about 2-3 frames per second.
ffdshow: After installing, SageTV doesn't think any of them are H.264 decoders. I choose "Show all decoders" and try all of the ffdshow video ones, but none of them work.

Why is this so hard?

My hardware: HD PVR, Windows XP Pro SP 3, Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, Radeon X1950 Pro.

* WAF = Wife Approval Factor.

[stanger89]

If you had Win7 I'd say try those, but since you don't. Maybe try the MPC-HC standalone filters. You can get them from sourceforge (follow the link on the MPC-HC site).

FWIW, I'm not sure what sort of H.264 you're trying to play, but if it's HD, your system is a little weak for it.

[joematt]

Hardware acceleration for CoreAVC only works with NVIDIA CUDA supported graphic cards.

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by martincmartin

So, here's my experience with H.264 decoders, the ones mentioned in this thread:

DivX: Works pretty well, although I get occasional error messages or crashes during FF/Rew. A pain for me, and hurts the WAF*.
CyberLink: The latest releases don't let the decoder be used with DirectShow and therefore SageTV.
ArcSoft: Same.
CoreAVC: I can't find a trial version, so I spend $10 on the full version. On 1080i video, it plays back at about 2-3 frames per second.
ffdshow: After installing, SageTV doesn't think any of them are H.264 decoders. I choose "Show all decoders" and try all of the ffdshow video ones, but none of them work.

Why is this so hard?

My hardware: HD PVR, Windows XP Pro SP 3, Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, Radeon X1950 Pro.

* WAF = Wife Approval Factor.

I was using Arcsoft video decoder for H.264 decoding in Vista with a HD2600 (Not very powerful video card), it would use 30 to 40% CPU (E6600).

Then upgraded to Win 7 and with the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder the CPU is now 9%. Can you imagine how a current video card would perform?

Bottom line get Win 7.

[martincmartin]

stanger89, thanks for the tip about the MPC-HC filters. I installed those, but none of them showed up in SageTV as H.264 filters. If I choose "List All," and select anything with MP4 or MPEG4 in the name, I actually get video, but SageTV crashes.

[stanger89]

You'll probably have to add them manually by placing them on the addition decoders lines in the properties file.

[Oats]

Originally Posted by martincmartin

stanger89, thanks for the tip about the MPC-HC filters. I installed those, but none of them showed up in SageTV as H.264 filters. If I choose "List All," and select anything with MP4 or MPEG4 in the name, I actually get video, but SageTV crashes.

I use the MPC-HC decoder and it's name is "MPC - Video decoder"

Also I thought the HD-PVR came with Arcsoft software that installed their decoders.

[martincmartin]

Thanks Oats, that works! I'm not sure how it affects the crashing during fast forward, I'll have to check that out.

[d2tw4all]

I had a lot of problems with using the software based decoders. I ended up just getting an HD200 and let me tell you, it's worth every penny!

Tom