1080P Video, ASUS HD2400Pro and high CPU Usage

[Jay]

I get almost 90% CPU usage when playing full HD clips, I know its intesive and thats why I got a HD2400Pro, I thought they where supposed to accelerate the video for you and take the load off the CPU?

I have had a look through the display drivers but can't find any options to help me.

[directhex]

what codec are you using? the codec needs to be aware of the graphics card and be able to off-load decoding properly. not all can.

[Jay]

I just used the Vista Codec pack.....

Should have said, I am using Vista 32bit

[directhex]

vista codec pack?

[Jay]

Development thread - current release is v4.5.6 final - MSFN Forums

[Skinleech]

Directhex means, what codec is the video file you are playing encoded with? You need to have software that is hardware acceleration capable, in the form of soemthing like PowerDVD or Nvidia Purevideo.

CoreAVC for example, whilst being a very effective decoder for AVC/h.264 enocded files, if software only, so if you have a lower powered system, it won't do you any good. ON the flip side, the PowerDVD 7.3 AVC/h.264 decoder does support hardware acceleration and can pass the grunt of decoding the file onto your GPu - providing the video file is encoded in the correctly.

[Jay]

I am using Vista media center and the files are h.264 encoded .M4V files using handbrake.

[directhex]

looks like it's using ffdshow for decoding, which is both software-only and not very optimized. multithreaded h264 playback is possible with ffdshow only with bleeding edge versions, and only on input files encoded with slices.

for gpu offloading, you need an avivo-aware h264 codec such as:
Elecard AVC PlugIn
CyberLink HD264 Pack for WMP

[masscrazy]

My quad at 3.0ghz using MPC (single core application) doesnt play 1080p .mkv movies properly. I have to use VLC player which is multi threaded, to play 1080p movies.

[Skinleech]

My quad at 3.0ghz using MPC (single core application) doesnt play 1080p .mkv movies properly. I have to use VLC player which is multi threaded, to play 1080p movies.

Mkv files are generally re-encodes from the source, be it a tv broadcast or a BD/HD-DVD. Most the these encode groups do not follow the h264 standards when encoding which doesn't help matters.

That being said, a multi core decoder, like CoreAVC should give you no issues at all. I can play back 1080p AVC sourced from Blu-ray on an X2 4400 in software without a hitch.