Do any SMP-aware video players exist?

[studtrooper]

Well, I've recently began collecting HDTV movies and captures (in .TS and .WMV format) and for the most part, they play great. Some of them though (like most of my 1080i sources) play choppy and have weird "clear" wavy lines in them some times. I know all my files are perfect, because I played them on a friend's computer who has a nice Athlon FX system. My problem? Well, technically I have a nice system (check my system specs at the top of my thread here). But if a video player is not SMP aware, I am only running on a 2.8ghz Xeon as far as that player is concerned. Looking in Windows XP Task Manager, I see my players (VLC, Power DVD, WMP10, etc) all reach 50% with these problem HDTV files, from which I logically concluded that it is processor starved.

Now back to my topic point: Does a SMP-aware video player exist for Windows XP? And yes, I am highly aware of xine, and quite perplexed that something supports Linux over Windows, but whatever...

[rallynavvie]

I guaran-damn-tee it isn't processing power. And you will either bodily dismiss my guess or make a vague attempt at disproving it. I'd venture to guess it's your AIW video card. Yeah yeah there are so many rabid AIW fans out there but ATi's support for those is still spotty, heaven forbid you're using it to capture that video.

For example, I use the Avermedia HD tuner to capture 1080 on my HTPC and I'm not getting any problems on playback, and that system is an old-school SMP rig: Tyan 2460 with dual 1900 MPs and a PNY 4400 video card (with the grounding mod done).

In fact I've heard people having problems with their ATi HD tuners as well, that's why I chanced it with the Avermedia card. I had an AIW card once upon a time and nothing will ever make me go back to a VIVO card ever again. Dedicated video in and dedicated video out from now on.

Other thing it may be is the AGP bridge on that card. Maybe you should upgrade to the Iwill DN800-SLI 8)

I just transferred an HD .DVR-MS file over to my main station and it played OK on a CRT in WMP and on my little preview TV (RCA composite out).

As for a truly SMP player you'd probably be better of posting over at 2CPU. IIRC the codec has a say in whether the file type can be used SMP or not in addition to the player. I'm thinking Quicktime may still be SMP on Windows. VLC should be. But honestly I'm not seeing much CPU utilization during playback on my video workstation. Are you really seeing it get worked on yours? I'm kinda curious

[studtrooper]

Heh, since you told me your 1900 MPs could play HDTV files, I decided to move a few trouble .ts files off my Xeon machine onto my families 2500+ Barton PC. It played nearly perfect on it. My mouth pretty much fell to the floor at that point. I think I'm going to be upgrading to the A64 939 platform (with X2 support of course) here within a month...

P.S.
The latest Quicktime (v7.0) doesn't support .ts or .wmv files, making it utterly useless, as per usual

[rallynavvie]

Wait, I said it was your video card. How did it change to the platform you're running it on?

And Quicktime isn't useless, you just have to encode everything to MPEG4 :P

[studtrooper]

Whoops, I should have caught that. I forgot to mention that these same problems persisted when I had a nVidia 6800 GT 256MB in there before my AIW x800 XT uprade. I was jonesing for a full-on upgrade anyway

[rallynavvie]

Oh and your input may be welcome over in this thread:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=280715

I think it's another PC-DL owner OCing M-0 2.4s. Just thought I'd grab your attention here while I've got it. My version of OCing my board is simplicity itself

[studtrooper]

Yeah, but your board costs a little over $100 from mine I checked and replied to that guys' thread...

[Soopafresh]

rally's got a good point on this. At work, we have a rack mounted PC that we use for HDTV projection onto a 20' viewing screen. The PC is low low LOW end -> 2.0 Ghz P4, 256MB RAM, on board video card, etc. But it has a hardware MPEG2 HDTV res decoder card in it and can play anything without stutter. Can't recall the brand, but it works perfectly.

[rallynavvie]

Yes but I'm quite sure my old 4400 doesn't have any such decoder and it was only seeing maybe 12-14% total processor utilization (roughly 1/4 of an Athlon 1900) when playing back HD files. IIRC MPEG2 decoders only see the code, not the res, so any true hardware decoder should take most, if not all, of the load off the system.

We're both running Xeons on an 875 platform so you should be seeing similar performance to mine. I can't imagine it's the ICH chipset making a difference.