How do the new 2.2 decoders fare?

[MonocularJack]

How do the new decoders in 2.2 stack up against Intervideo/nVidia/Sonic? Are we thinking this was just a distribution issue to remove dependences or are they viable contenders? I'm currently cable-deep in testing MCE 2005 so I don't have a box to try out the new beta on to see for myself.

[mlbdude]

They are pretty good but they do not support DXVA (hardware acceleration). This is generally what most users run. They include the decoders mainly for ease of setup, however, if you do not run DXVA (ffdshow/DScaler users) they are definitely usable.

[mikejaner]

The Nvidia and Sonic Drivers still have the best picture. But the Sage ones are free like the ones which come with the Hauppauge cards, so you can't argue with that.

[GbrNole]

the dscaler5 ones are free too and slap all but the nvidia codecs about the side of the head and if your pc is weak and you want to use ffdshow then they are efficient enough to allow higher settings than you get from nvidia.

[kny3twalker]

are you sure these decoders do not support DXVA
I asked over at Dscaler if their decoders were supporting DXVA and they said no
but this was untrue
Dscaler 5 supports DXVA so how can you be so sure that these do not

and they are better than the decoders included with the hauppauge card but that about it
Dscaler 5 is a better free option

[stanger89]

No, they don't support DXVA. IMO, they are very good, I still prefer nVidia's newest, but they are definitely competent.

kny,

How did you come to the conclusion that Dscaler 5 supports DXVA? AFAIK, there's no way to enable it, and John (the author) stated that he hadn't implimented DXVA support.

[kny3twalker]

from using radlight
by default IDCT is acclerated
and I got the same skipping when fast fowarding in SageTV
if I changed this from accelerated to reference then the skipping went away

I am pretty sure IDCT acceleration is part of DXVA/hardware acceleration

also I am not completely sure the fast foward bug has gone away completely
I am still using NvVPP though
it seems to be giving the best playback and close to the best image
with pixel adaptive I do get some frame drops

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by kny3twalker

by default IDCT is acclerated

I'm 99.99% sure that's not DXVA, it's either SSE/SSE2/3Dnow accellerated, or just an optomized method.

For example (radeon 9500 - Athlon XP 1800)
Dscaler 5 "Accellerated" I get about 30% CPU
Dscaler 5 "Reference" - 30% CPU (might be a little less, like 25-27%) - this actually surprised me
Dscaler 5 "MMX Only" - 25% CPU
nVidia DXVA - 12% CPU

[heffe2001]

If you use a hex editor, you can see who makes the drivers they are using... Copyright tag in the files say it's MainConcept. So if Mainconcept's decoder uses DXVA, I'm gonna guess the included ones do too...

BUT I've not tried it to be sure...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by heffe2001

If you use a hex editor

All you have to do is open the config pannel (via graphedit or Radlight) to see who they're from

[coppit]

I was unimpressed compared to the Hauppage NonCSS decoders. The SciFi logo had serious jaggies with this decoder