Media player setup: default vs custom

[Vidra]

Hi there,
I've just discovered this forum so forgive me if my question is trivial (or have been answered before).
There are many interesting guides all over the internets about filters and splitters and codecs and hardware acceleration setups.
I barely have a clue what these things are, and I'd really like to know if following a guide like these -
http://imouto.my/configuring-potplayer-for-gpu-accelerated-video-playback-with-dxva-or...ware-decoding/
http://www.svp-team.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=284
- would make noticeable difference (apart from the SVP thingy) over a simple default install of VLC or Potplayer, for watching movies on a notebook (specs below).
I don't use special file formats or video editing/converting and I don't have fancy audio and display devices.

tl;dr - Simple setup VS fancy-complex setup to watch movies on average-joe laptop.

specs - Dell-inspiron 15.6", intel i7(sandy-2GHz), Gt525m(1Gb), 8Gb ram, win8(x64).
Thank you!

[Hoser Rob]

Neither vlc or potplayer (or smplayer, which is what I use unless vlc plays a video better, which is rare) require any external codecs/splitters et al. Which is just as it should be.

Many video settings in software players involve making them work better on old or low end hardware. Which isn't a problem with you.

My personal torture test for video playing is a very well encoded 1080p h.264 .mkv file which is about 16Gb large. That's over 10Kb/s bit rate. My i3 4Gb based laptop can play it with no problems at about 20% CPU usage. That's in linux, which is pretty efficient, but still ... playing video isn't that hard.

Now with 4K video, that may require some tweaking.

Another thing is, the potplayer documentation/support is pitiful. VLC's is excellent but I find the design of the settings menus pretty cockeyed. SMplayer is a lot easier to set up. MPC-HC looks simple until you try to change settings and then you're straight into video geek territory. I yanked it ages ago.

Don't be afraid of just trying different settings. Just remember, only change one thing at a time. if you don't like the result, turn it off.

[Baldrick]

I just use the default settings on my laptop.

But if I connect it to my 55" TV I like to tweak the settings a bit....mostly to get it play smoothly.

[jagabo]

DXVA does reduce CPU load -- but it doesn't work properly with all videos. Sometimes you have to disable it and resort to CPU decoding. Your graphics card may have several image processing options. Things like noise reduction, contrast enhancement, sharpening, skin tone enhancement, etc. In my opinion, most of these degrade the picture (just like similar settings on TVs) when playing professionally produced video, but some people like them. Calibrate your video settings to get the levels and colors right, even just eyeyballing it, and you don't need all those other options.

There are a few options that are useful, things like deblocking and deringing. But they are usually part of the codec, not post processing by the graphics card.

[hello_hello]

MPC-HC, MPC-BE and Potplayer all support DXVA (hardware decoding) "out of the box". There's no need for special configurations and external splitter/decoders renderers etc, although it's nice they can be used if you want to.

MPC-HC is about as simple as it gets when it comes to configuring a player (despite what was said in an earlier post). When you go into it's settings and switch renderers it'll show you which ones support DXVA (amongst other things). Simply select a renderer which supports it and you're done. When DXVA is being used for decoding it'll display DXVA in the status bar (not all types of video are supported and it also depends on your video card, but h264 video up to High Profile, Level 4.1 is pretty much always supported and that'd be the main requirement).

MPC-BE is a variation of MPC-HC. I've recently switched from MPC-HC to MPC-BE simply because MPC-BE displays thumbnail previews of video when you move the mouse along the navigation bar. Other than that, it's not much different to MPC-HC. Potplayer is very much like MPC-HC on steroids as far as "features" go, although I find MPC-HC or MPC-BE simpler to use because they don't have a squillion different options/settings as Potplayer does, but they're still very configurable.

[Vidra]

Thank you! One more thing:
Are there any benefits of enabling hardware-accelerated decoding (such as intel-QuickSync) apart from saving CPU resources?

[hello_hello]

Not that I know of. The idea is to use the GPU for decoding instead of the CPU as the GPU is more efficient for that sort of work, plus it leaves the CPU free to do other things.