Playing a h.264 aac MKV file with PowerDVD 7.3 nvidia purevideo installed

[maxpower2078]

I am having trouble playing a file encoded with the h.264 video codec with Power DVD. I read to just change the extension to something that powerdvd recognizes, but that didn't work either.

VLC plays it fine, but I have a Nvidia 8800GTS with nvidia pureVideo installed and want it to use the GPU to process the info.

Also on anther note, the audio from other xvid/ac3 files says that it errors out, yet it still plays using the PowerDVD ac3 decoder.

Here is my system

core 2 duo 6600
2 GB ram
8800GTS 640
Win XP Pro/ upgraded to Media Center 2005

[Baldrick]

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic330192.html#1708036

[maxpower2078]

Well, that posts says that there is no hardware acceleration for h.264 video, but nvidia says there is.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html

Who is right and if nvidia is correct on their product, how do you get it working?

[jman98]

One guy suggested here that installing the Matroska Splitter might help, but I haven't tested it. I've never seen a post from anyone who says that they are getting good results from Pure Video to play H.264 files. It seems to me, based on what I've read and personal experience, that unless you have the fastest multi-core CPUs available that H.264 playback is going to be challenging. I don't understand why so many people are encoding with it given that it seems that almost nobody actually has a system fast enough to play it back properly. The reality seems to be that for whatever reason the GPU is not actually being used for H.264 playback, so that's why you need the best CPU you can get - the CPU, not the GPU, is what is really going to play these files at this time.

[Heywould3]

i cant seem to find the article but i read in two places one being the AVS forum the other being the nvidia site. the 8800 wont use nvidia pureVideo feature on anything but xp and it looks like you are using media center. if you have an xp box try putting the card in that or dual boot .. PITA i know. i also read that nvidia is working on drivers for vista and WMC. dont hold breath.

if you read around the avs forum you will see that people with the 79xx and 85xx 86xx cards are getting H.264 playback with little or no issues.

[khat17]

AFAIK - The hardware decoder (video card) will take a HUGE load off the CPU. Checking my CPU usage playing back an AVI file encoded as a 1080p X264 file, the CPU usage on a single core CPU is close to - or always at - 100% usage. On a multi-core system, the usage is about 50% (Core2). Once POWERDVD was used to open the file, the CPU usage on either system idled at 0%-4% never going over 10% at occasional spikes. I can say for certain that it helps.

On another note however, the software that is used to access the hardware decoder (POWERDVD) cannot open MKV/OGM files. The application is not intelligent enough to send the video stream to the decoder from these container formats - only from AVI. As far as I recall, I don't think POWERDVD even recognizes those file formats. Renaming an MKV/OGM to AVI will not help, as the file header will not be read by the application.

The only graphics cards by nVidia that support the hardware decoding of H264 streams are the G92 chipsets (and I guess anything that comes thereafter). Older (G80) chipsets will not be able to do so. You'd have to check your card to find out, as having a G80 8800GTS versus a G92 8800GTS will show the difference in the ability to do the decode.

I'm waiting impatiently for an application to come out that will play back ALL the different video containers (but at least AVI/MKV/OGM/MOV) and be able to send the video stream to the hardware decoder. Until then, I doubt I'll use POWERDVD - since CCCP is what I use - but hopefully someone makes an app that can do this, or CYBERLINK updates POWERDVD to have this ability. I guess we'll see.

PeAcE.

[rallynavvie]

I thought it was only the x600GT series of cards that had the hardware decoding ability (6600GT, 7600GT, 8600GT) before the 9-series came in? Look at the features page for the 8-series cards, in particular the note on that second bullet point under features about PureVideo decoding:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html
Seems only the 8500 and 8600 series support hardware decoding and only in Vista.