VC1 hardware bluray playback?

[MitchSchaft]

I recently bought a bluray drive for my PC and restarted my Netflix subscription in hopes of playing bluray in Sage. I have Sage setup to recognize the bluray drive no problem using the share method and AnyDVD.

It turns out that bluray movies using VC1 (m2ts) won't play and I get an exception error. '3:10 to Yuma' is what I was playing with last night.

I have PDVD10 installed, babgvant's antipack, haali splitter, and Divx H.264 decoders installed. Is there a way I can force VC1 to playback in Sage? I've researched for hours and I can't find posts where anybody has it done. Babgvant says he has it using TMT2 decoders I think. I've gone as far as to disable Windows vc1 decoders since they are software only. I get a lot of studdering otherwise. Everything plays fine in PDVD10.

I use graphedit to check things out. When I open an .m2ts file directly off the disk with graphedit, I can get it to play using the antipack decoders. But, they're software. And I still get the exception error in Sage, regardless. I even tried setting the VC1 decoder in Sage client properties file to the MPC Video Decoder and that didnt help.

I'm running Win7-x86, Geforce GT-220 video card, and an AMD B2350 dualcore.

What do you guys think?

[Rico66]

Known issue, which has been discussed many times, e.g. in this thread http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49329

[MitchSchaft]

I've read through that thread yesterday. I guess I should submit a bug report.

[panteragstk]

I've been messing with vc-1 since v7 came out. My bug report reply stated that they are aware of the problem and are in the process of fixing it. Check out this thread for some discussion.

[MitchSchaft]

Thanks. I went ahead and submitted a report as well.
I feel better knowing that it might be fixed one day. I don't mind having to open up another program in the meantime.

[Rico66]

I had submitted a bug report more than a month ago, but haven't heard anything back. So yes the more people report this, the better...

[MitchSchaft]

So how are you guys that have a bluray drive playing the movies? The only other program I've tried is PowerDVD 10. Are there any better options out there? I'd love to set PDVD10 up to use AC3filter if that's possible.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

So how are you guys that have a bluray drive playing the movies? The only other program I've tried is PowerDVD 10. Are there any better options out there? I'd love to set PDVD10 up to use AC3filter if that's possible.

I use arcsoft tmt in dshow mode for .m2ts files and it works perfectly. I'm confident that sage will fix this soon. If not then I really hope they give us the ability to choose the splitter of our choice. Especially since the gabest mpc-hc splitter worked wonderfully in v6.

[MitchSchaft]

Is that the latest version you're using over v2?

[Rico66]

At the moment I'm using MPC-HC, which works fairly well in combination with the external application plug-in. I still have an older version of PDVD7, just in case I want to browse the menus of a BD.

BTW, why do you care about ac3filter? That's one thing that I immediately disable after installing Sage...

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

Is that the latest version you're using over v2?

tmt3 actually. V2 has problems with windows 7. I'm going to try the external app thing and see if that makes this any easier until sage figures something out.

[MitchSchaft]

I was havin some trouble with PDVD10 not passing through 7-channel audio from the 3:10 to yuma disc last night, even though it's set to passthrough SPDIF. It could've been something else. Things were kind of blurry from last night with all this trouble .
I usually use AC3filter to passthrough. I quit using ffdshow later last year. I'll have to check out the external app program, too.

[MitchSchaft]

Hey, I just got a reply back from the support team:

VC1 is not supported yet for BluRay playback on the PC; we are still working
on that and it will be in an upcoming beta release (not the next one
though).

Cheers,

SageTV Support Team
SageTV, LLC

Sounds good to me.

[Rico66]

Did anybody try vc1 with .16? The new version does play with the WMVideo Decoder DMO, but it stutters quite badly in my case.

I tried to use different video decoders within the sage client, but non of them worked. The MPC Video Decoder loads, but stutters even more (plays perfectly fine within the MPC player). ffdhshow does not load and crashes the sage client instead.

I'm planning to file a bug, but wanted to check out 1st, if this works for others. Does anybody have success with vc1 playback now?

[MitchSchaft]

I did, too, and it plays but studders. That's because it's using your CPU instead of the video card's GPU . They're using the default microsoft decoder instead of something that will use the GPU I guess.
I'm still using Cyberlink externally to play Blurays. I was hoping there was a way to launch it using the external app addon, but can't figure that one out yet.

[Rico66]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

I did, too, and it plays but studders. That's because it's using your CPU instead of the video card's GPU . They're using the default microsoft decoder instead of something that will use the GPU I guess.
I'm still using Cyberlink externally to play Blurays. I was hoping there was a way to launch it using the external app addon, but can't figure that one out yet.

Yes External App is a workaround. I use that for MPC, and it works pretty good. Not sure, if you can do the same with Cyberlink though...

So why are there settings in sageclient.properties to configure AV decoders, if in the end only one some of them work?

[MitchSchaft]

Originally Posted by Rico66

So why are there settings in sageclient.properties to configure AV decoders, if in the end only one some of them work?

Good question. I just don't know how a lot of this stuff works to answer that. I have no idea why we can't choose our own VC-1 stuff to enable hardware support.

[Fuzzy]

You can put any VC-1 decoder in there.. but the graph would still have to be able to successfully built. DirectShow is not foolproof, and some filters simply don't work well together.. (maybe worth another vote for Sage to start working on a MediaFoundation framework).

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

You can put any VC-1 decoder in there.. but the graph would still have to be able to successfully built. DirectShow is not foolproof, and some filters simply don't work well together.. (maybe worth another vote for Sage to start working on a MediaFoundation framework).

this is very true. I can get stuff to play perfectly in graphedit all day, but try the same file within sage and for some reason sage adds extra filters that break playback. I wish we could just build a custom graph for a file type and force sage to use it. That would solve lots of problems...

[MitchSchaft]

I thought babgvant had a tool to do that he recently built. I couldn't ever figure out how to work it, though, lol.