VideoLan VLC player 1.1 useless?

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › VideoLan VLC player 1.1 useless?

dale77

294 posts

Ultimate Geek

#63469 27-Jun-2010 23:02

I had forgotten how finely balanced these HTPC systems are. I wanted to try out another player other than mediaportal, so I thought I'd give the (highly regarded?) VLC a try in it's freshest incarnation.

http://www.videolan.org/

Result - Freeview recording replay FAIL. Audio with frozen pixellated video... Same story for 1080i and 720p h264 recordings.

Yikes. Is this the best opensource can do? Perhaps others have better experiences?

HTPC: Antec Fusion 430, Intel i3, Gigabyte 1050, Corsair 4x1Gb, Hauppauge WinTv, Logitech z-5500, Logitech Harmony 525, Yamaha Rx-v6a, Samsung KS8000 4k, Windows 10, Mediaportal 1.30, BLU-RAY: Panasonic UB820

rscole86

4968 posts

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#345893 27-Jun-2010 23:05

I have always had issues with VLC. Mainly due to EVR.

Have a go with Media Player Classic - Homecinema.

kyhwana2

2563 posts

Uber Geek

#345895 27-Jun-2010 23:18

Does your machine have an ATI card in it? Apparently 1.1 does GPU decoding, but only on nvidia GPUs, their ATI decoders are badly broken atm..

dale77

294 posts

Ultimate Geek

#345905 28-Jun-2010 00:08

kyhwana2: Does your machine have an ATI card in it? Apparently 1.1 does GPU decoding, but only on nvidia GPUs, their ATI decoders are badly broken atm..

Yep. ATI all the way! :-) Except in my desktop which has an ... errrmm... 7600GS...

Should I feel slightly better that half of the graphics cards in the world will be broken with VLC?

Actually I was disappointed, but not entirely surprized. HTPC hd video and audio seems to be very complex, such that no software anywhere can handle it without issues somewhere in the chain.

dale77

294 posts

Ultimate Geek

#345910 28-Jun-2010 00:31

rscole86: I have always had issues with VLC. Mainly due to EVR.

Have a go with Media Player Classic - Homecinema.

Definitely better. Regular dodgy stutter though, even with <15% cpu. At least I was able to add my "golden" PCM h264 filter as an external filter, and monogram aac filter, to get perfect playback.

k1wi

484 posts

Ultimate Geek

#345918 28-Jun-2010 07:06

It's not that half the graphics cards in the world are broken, it's just that they're not being utilised by VLC.... yet....

ATI has already come out and said that it is working on a catalyst update to take advantage of VLC gpu offloading.

ATI has always been behind NVidia in terms of GPGPU, for two reasons. First, ATI was the first to move down that route, but in the process has shifted languages (BROOKS+ -> CAL), where as NVidia has always had CUDA. Add to that ATI has traditionally been behind in the driver stakes (although it is attempting to make amends with their monthly updates).

The other reason is that ATI is vector whereas NVidia is not... This makes ATI cards theoretically more powerful, but a lot more effort to efficiently use the power.

k1wi

I have a HD4770 myself... :)

hellonearthisman

1819 posts

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#345923 28-Jun-2010 07:50

I find it VLC plays FreeView recordings ok, But I have a Nvidia card.

mikerussellnz

283 posts

Ultimate Geek

#345949 28-Jun-2010 09:37

Turn HW accel off and try it. It plays both 1080i and 720p captures for me (on Mac though), although the cpu usage is high due to no hardware acceleration.

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Shop now for Lenovo laptops and other devices (affiliate link).

dale77

294 posts

Ultimate Geek

#346023 28-Jun-2010 12:59

mikerussellnz: Turn HW accel off and try it. It plays both 1080i and 720p captures for me (on Mac though), although the cpu usage is high due to no hardware acceleration.

Thanks for the tip, but I don't think I'll bother. I was trying this out as an alternative h264 player on Vista.

videolan:

It plays everything!

Yeah right.

dale77

294 posts

Ultimate Geek

#346025 28-Jun-2010 13:12

hellonearthisman: I find it VLC plays FreeView recordings ok, But I have a Nvidia card.

That's nice for the nvidia folks.

http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding

The previous link says for ATI

videolan wiki:

First, you are required to use a GPU supporting Unified Video Decoder.

We believe you need a GPU supporting UVD+, but you might require a UVD2 compatible GPU. We don't have the hardware to test so far. We have tested against Radeon 4K so far.

Then, ATI cards seems to be very slow to get the data back from the GPU. So far, it seems that you need a SSE4.1 compatible CPU to decode, in order to use MOVNTDQA instruction. This may change in the future!

Sounds like these guys don't have a whole heap of hardware to test with. Not even a Radeon 5k? Also that SSE4.1 compatibility thing would rule out AMD cpus, as these do not support intel SSE4.1.

UVD2 means Radeon 4k, UDVD+ means Radeon 3k.

k1wi

484 posts

Ultimate Geek

#346029 28-Jun-2010 13:29

That they only have a limited amount of hardware isn't surprising, it's a bugbear of all opensource/freeware projects, unless they are lucky enough to have serious backing from industry... Although I would wonder why they didn't release it to a beta group... The VLC group also have a bit of a weakness in that they only have a couple of Windows coders: most of their developer group are Linux coders.

You might like the following link:

http://twitter.com/CatalystMaker/status/17136413282

VideoLAN will have a VLC player update coming soon to work with the upcoming Cat 10.7 coming soon. Everything works good - all coming soon