It's widely known that ATI card owners do not have the luxury of Nvidia card owners when it comes to playing HD video in MPC-HC in DXVA mode. With the built-in H.264/AVC video decoder, HD video such as 1920x800 with reference frames of 6 and above (i.e. L5.0 / L5.1 AVC streams) won't play (actually, it usually plays but with corrupted blocks and/or video freezing after a few seconds).
What I've gathered from the comments of the readers of my original post about this issue and from months of testing using a plethora of mixing and matching on my own HTPC, I thought it'll save everyone some time for me to post a summary of what settings worked with Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. I previously said it's necessary to use PowerDVD 9 for DXVA with ATI HD 4000 series (such as my ATI HD 4350) but that is no longer true and that a better combination has been found thanks to those who contributed in my previous blog post. This is only for ATI card owners with UVD 2 (or newer) though. HD3000 series owners, you guys are out of luck unfortunately (you have AMD / ATI to thank).
Here are some settings I've tested and their results:
Common settings:
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz (underclocked to 2.0GHz, DDR2@222MHz (444MHz effective), HT disabled)
ATI HD 4350 (Asus) - 512MB RAM @ 400MHz DDR2 (800MHz effective)
Windows XP SP3 (latest Windows Update as of 18 August 2009)
ATI Catalyst 9.7
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Build 1237 x86 (download here)
Haali Media Splitter externally installed (i.e. not using MPC-HC's one)
DirectVobSub
Here's what I've found.
So long as you have the DXVA decoder output pin directly connected to the renderer, you'll get proper working DXVA decode with up to 16 ref-frames for full HD streams (1920x1080) regardless of the renderer (well, almost):
VMR7 (Windowed) = OK
VMR9 (Windowed) = failed (pink vertical stripes with Motion Vectors)
VMR7 Renderless = OK
VMR9 Renderless = OK
For the sake of discussion, let's use the VMR7 (Windowed) renderer. It has been proven to work with both Cyberlink's PDVD8 AVC decoder and ArcSoft's Video Decoder. With MPC's DXVA decoder, video with ref-frames of 12 and above will freeze after a few seconds of playback. Cyberlink's decoder suffers from occassional judder while ArcSoft's Video Decoder plays up to 16
ref-frames in DXVA mode perfectly. The results vary when other renderers are used. For example, the combo of VMR9 Renderless + MPC's DXVA decoder yielded the same pink vertical stripes.
I still have not found a combination that would get subtitles working without causing issues with DXVA decode. Under VMR9 Renderless + ArcSoft + MPC-HC internal subtitles renderer, the video would playback in like half the speed! Frames are decoded and rendered correctly though. If anyone has any idea how to solve that, I'd be all ears!
Update: With ATI Catalyst 9.8, the combo of "VMR9 Renderless + ArcSoft + MPC-HC internal subtitles renderer" now works properly. Although with DirectVobSub, the half-frame-rate playback issue is still there.
Update 2: It appears that, in order to get the results I've published here, you'll need to 'initialize' the ATI driver for proper operation of DirectX by opening the Catalyst Control Center each time you start / restart your PC (not sure about stand-by / hibernate). I was taken by surprise yesterday for not doing so - I got a blank white screen instead of the normal proper video playback. Once I opened the CCC (and closed it), reopening MPC-HC and the video then worked fine. *Bravo ATI!* You've got my standing ovation.
Anyway, this is the settings that I've found to work under MPC-HC without subtitles:
MPC-HC settings:
Renderer - VMR7 (Windowed)
Auto load subtitles - false (see Update above)
DirectVobSub options - disable autoload subtitles
Use ArcSoft Video Decoder as your AVC/H.264 decoder
Use AC3Filter directshow decoder
Again, make sure your DXVA decoder's output pin is connected directly to the renderer's input pin. This means under your DirectVobSub filter options, make sure it never loads subtitles and that it is blocked under your MPC-HC external filters page. The following is what I've configured under that page:
Arcsoft video decoder - preferred.
AC3Filter - preferred.
DirectVobSub - blocked.
