Problem with framerate of H.264 movies!?!

[Nilhanth]

I need some help to find out, firstly whether it's possible for me to play H.264 encoded video files at an acceptable framerate, and secondly how!

Now, I realise that (to my disappointment) my "once-£300" graphics card (GeForce 6800GT) does not have H.264 hardware acceleration support, which quite frankly P****S me off, but nevertheless I cannot let it defeat me. However, I was wondering if this is the sole reason I can't play at smooth framerates (at the moment it's like 1 frame every 5 seconds!!!)

I don't have a crap PC, my CPU is AthlonXP3200+ with 1GB of PC3200/DDR400 RAM and my GeForce6800GT is the 256MB version! Is there anything I'm doing wrong to get such an abysmal framerate?

Thanks in advance!

PS: I've tried using both QuickTime 7 and Media Player Classic. Same results for both!

[Baldrick]

which player or decoder?

i use coreavc and it works perfect! it's not free though.

[Nilhanth]

Sorry, just updated my post. Used QT7 and Media Player Classic

[Baldrick]

and if you want to play h264 mov files you can also use coreavc, rename the mov to mp4 and use haali media splitter and coreavc...maybe easier ways...but it works.

[Nilhanth]

Well for the sake of playing a few video files whic i'll probably delete afterwards, I'd rather not pay for a program such as CoreAVC. Are there any freeware apps that do the job just as good?

[Baldrick]

No. But you could try latest ffdshow and set it to decode h264/avc and play the video in windows media player or try vlc.

[jagabo]

What frame size and frame rate are you trying to play? You should have no problem decoding h.264 at SD frame sizes (720x480 or 720x576) and frame rates (30 or25 fps) or less. HD resolutions like 1280x720 or 1920x1080 may be problematic.

And what size are you viewing at? If you are not using your video card's overlay feature the CPU will be used to resize the video. If you are playing low resolution video full screen at a high resolution (like 1600x1200) you may run into problems without overlay.

[edDV]

You won't see full hardware decoding on display cards yet. Probably another year. Current ATI AVIVO cards have some hardware MPeg4 decoding support but not enough for full quality playback at HD.

The software h.264 players are all sacrificing quality to get full frame rate even at SD.

[celtic_druid]

No such thing as sacrificing quality. All spec compliant decoders should have 100% identical output.

XP 3200+?? Didn't think that the K7's went that high.

QT is about the worst possible (read slowest) decoder that you could use. Also you don't need to rename mov's. Haali's splitter as well as Gabest's can handle them fine.

[Nilhanth]

You won't see full hardware decoding on display cards yet. Probably another year. Current ATI AVIVO cards have some hardware MPeg4 decoding support but not enough for full quality playback at HD.

The software h.264 players are all sacrificing quality to get full frame rate even at SD.

This is not true! The latest nVIDIA cards have full H.264 hardware acceleration support:- http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

If you look at the table (link above), you'll se my card (GeForce 6800GT) doesn't support H.264 unfortunately! Which is why I'm asking whether this is the sole reason I'm getting crappy framerates!

[celtic_druid]

full H.264 hardware acceleration support would mean 0% CPU load for H.264 decoding(still some for parsing the stream, etc.)... and I would imagine that in reality CoreAVC offers lower CPU loads than nVidia's even though it currently lacks hardware acceleration. Anyone have benchmarks?