Use material acceleration completely with ATI vidéos cards

[Tiri]

Hello, I've got an Ati X800Pro Vivo, so this card have a material acceleration for the wmv format (I can see it in the drivers). And it work because if I desactivate it my processor is much more used.

But for example for HD vidéos I can read the 1080p format without any saccade with windows media player (knowing that this is a .mov format) with the ffdshow codec.

And I discover recently that I've got a lot of sacade with VLC with this format. Indeed when reading the CPU is used at 100% so I conclude that VLC didn't use the material acceleration of my vidéo card.

So I think it will be great in order to improve performance that VLC can use this type of material acceleration in future version.

[Guest]

X800 ain't AVIVO card so acceleration thingy is bit unsure.
If you want VLC to be hardware accelerated please tell Microsoft and/or ATI to release at least some API's how to enable this thing.
WMV3 in VLC is playbacked via DMO so test some WMV3 material and tell does it make any difference?

[Tiri]

Yes I know these cards aren't Avivo but they have a wmv acceleration. you can read it in this type of article (sorry in french).

http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/print.php?id=21453&c=1

For the API i know that the ati drivers enable the acceleration and I know there is an ATI linux driver (but I use the flgrx) but if I remember well it is proprietary... (And the test was made under windows...)

So it's the first time for me that VLC is less optimized than WMPlayer. And I only say it to you because I have not got the need to read this type of videos so it's a form of report only...

An exemple of video with sacades :
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount ... bleiii/hd/

and choose 1080p.

And I didn't understand well the end of your post (I'm french sorry). I guess that DMO is a file format. But i didn't understand the manip you want I make

Thank you for your answer (Indeed on this forum answer are rares..)

[Guest]

DMO is API like Directshow or VfW (video for windows).
And under Windows VLC uses Microsofts WMV decoder for WMV3 material, so if the acceleration doesn't work with VLC it must be figured why (does WMP use another WMV3 decoder which ain't default WMV3 decoder? or does the decoder need some extra runtime commads or what?) and after that someone can add the feature to VLC.

And ATI in Linux doesn't support Video Acceleration.
I don't understand word "sacades" <-- French for lagging?
Apple uses H.264 which has nothing to do with WMV.

[nw42]

hmm - it's a difficult situation because as mentioned above the GPU acceleration isn't well documented and only commercial DVD player makers have full support for it...

on the other side this results in a weakness of VLC to decode high definition material in H.264 format because of the computing intensive decoding and the fact that currently the software decoder isn't realy speed optimized. (as they say - see experimental status of H.264)

the apple quicktime player alike VLC hasn't GPU support but is multithreaded and so can play even the strongest 1080p H.264 files on dualcore computers

most commercial DVD player software has GPU support and can handle 1080p H.264 even on slow singe core CPU's if the GPU is strong enough

but VLC hasn't GPU nor multicore support and so You have to try the most expensive "highend gamer" CPU's and hope it's sufficient for playback without lags...

best regards

Danko

[Tiri]

Okay I read this attentively and I understand : the problem is always the same for the free software so good luck for development...

"but VLC hasn't GPU nor multicore support and so You have to try the most expensive "highend gamer" CPU's and hope it's sufficient for playback without lags..." In my case is a Barton 3200+ so I think it's normal that there are lags

"I don't understand word "sacades" <-- French for lagging? " yes excuse my bad english :p