can my htpc have a better interface other than mpc-hc? and still play mkv?

[craig198]

hi all! just wondering if my htpc can have a nice interface i.e. movie scraping and nice catalog of artwork for all my mkv movie rips. its a 780g chipset so I need a player that can use that hardware for decoding hd.

right now I just use the stale looking mpc hc player which does a great job. Just want to see if Im missing out somewhere.

[jagabo]

XBMC: http://xbmc.org/
Boxee: http://www.boxee.tv/make

[craig198]

thanks for the reply. yes I have tried xbmc. does it hardware decode as well as mpchc does?

i will try both and post back thanks again.

[jagabo]

Boxee definitely supports DXVA. I don't know if XBMC supports it directly but I've read about alternative players that work with it:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=61355

It looks like you can also use MPCHC:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=70727

[craig198]

ya xbmc does have an option for dxva. not sure how well it will work. i noticed a couple of stutters playing wmv hd movie. but not bad. but this was on my main pc not my living room which has an inferior dualcore processor.

[jagabo]

All programs using DXVA should get about the same performance on a particular graphics card.

[craig198]

ok so xbmc isnt outputting any sound over optical even though Ive setup it to do so. boxee is outputting audio in 5.1 over optical. I love boxee interface and it found all my movies and put covers and whatnot. however it doesnt handle fullscreen mkv's very well. they playback very jerky and audio gets out of sync pretty bad. letterboxed mkvs do okay. a little jerkiness but watchable and audio is perfect in sync.

anyway to get xbmc to play with my spdif audio line? i put the sound to analog and it plays audio but only 2 channels. so I get no dialog from the movies only front R/L audio.

[jagabo]

I love boxee... however it doesnt handle fullscreen mkv's very well. they playback very jerky

Hmm. I have a 785 chipset and haven't noticed any problems. I don't have many full blu-ray rips though.

<edit>
No, you're right. High bitrate 1920x1080 files are playing back jerky in Boxee but play ok in MPCHC with DXVA.
</edit>

[craig198]

ya im not too worried about the full screen playback. would like to solve these audio issues with xbmc

[jagabo]

I don't know much about XMBC. Can't help you there.

I did notice that Boxee had very high CPU usage (Athlon64 X2) while playing Apparently it's not using hardware decoding even though it's enabled in the options. That computer previously had a Nvidia graphics card in it. I seem to remember that working much better in the past.

[craig198]

another interesting thing is that my mainpc is windows7 64bit and xbmc on there has a dxva2 option.
my htpc is windows xp 32 and has no option in xbmc

think i might be going back to mpchc soon lol. i love the looks of these programs but just cant use them.

[jagabo]

another interesting thing is that my mainpc is windows7 64bit and xbmc on there has a dxva2 option.
my htpc is windows xp 32 and has no option in xbmc

A Win7 vs XP issue? I was running XP.

think i might be going back to mpchc soon lol. i love the looks of these programs but just cant use them.

I did see someone was working on a way to integrate MPCHC into XBMC. I don't know how well it worked out.

<edit>
Ah, found this from a Boxee developer:

DXVA for Win XP is only through DShow so we're not using it.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=63605&page=2
</edit>

[craig198]

ahh that makes sense then why I am seeing differences from xp to win7

[craig198]

cool I have got mpchc running with xbmc!

im putting windows 7 on htpc and see how that does with audio issues and dxva2 will report back.


well I had some audio troubles again and now I dont know how I got it to work but it works now. 5.1 digital optical out! sweet. I had to change my windows 7 resolution to 720p and xbmc as well because it was too laggy. Guess my comp is not enough to handle all the artwork that is xbmc.