Posts Categorised: Codecs

0Optimal LAV and mad-vr settings for a high end GPU at 1080p

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I have spent a lot of time exper­i­ment­ing with mad-vr and lav try­ing to find the optim­al set­tings for my GTX 1050Ti which out­puts to a 1080p pro­ject­or. Set­tings for high­er res­ol­u­tion dis­plays will be very dif­fer­ent, but as 4k pro­ject­ors are cur­rently so expens­ive, for a truly “home cinema” exper­i­ence 1080p is the lim­it for most people.
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0Updating QT Lite & QuickTime alternative

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

I’ve long been a user of Quick­Time Altern­at­ive, as a much light­er altern­at­ive to the full Apple Quick­Time. Sadly QT Altern­at­ive (and its cous­in QT Lite) has­n’t been updated in over a year, whilst Quick­Time has received sev­er­al secur­ity and bug fixes. Updat­ing QT Lite is a straight­for­ward pro­cess which I will detail below. I have also built an updated installer which is avail­able on the [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads page[/intlink].  This installer is based on Apple Quick­Time 7.7.3 (28-Dec-2012)

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0codecsComplete codec setup guide for Windows 7⁄8

Posted by & filed under Codecs.

Win­dows 8 is fin­ished and will soon be avail­able for retail sale. With that in mind it seemed a good time to write an updated guide to get­ting codecs set up for a fully oper­a­tion­al HTPC for both Win­dows 7 and 8. For this guide I’m using a new fea­ture of HTML5 which cre­ates expand­able instruc­tions. At the time of writ­ing this is only sup­por­ted by chrome and safari 6 but hope­fully oth­er browsers will add sup­port in the near future.

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0Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoDecoding Interlaced VC‑1 with DXVA

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

A couple of days ago ver­sion 1.6 of Media Play­er Clas­sic — Home Cinema was released. Although I don’t use MPC-HC, I do keep an eye on the releases as it can be a use­ful back-up when a file wont play. It’s been quite a long time since the last offi­cial release so I had a quick scan of the changelog and one thing imme­di­ately leaped at me: “VC‑1 DXVA Decoder now decodes VC‑1 inter­laced mater­i­al”. Until now there has been no open source x64 codec that will decode inter­laced VC‑1. Finally hav­ing this avail­able com­pletes cov­er­age for all the media files I have ever tried to play. Hope­fully this will also get added to ffd­show try­outs and LAV Video in the near future.

0Haali Matroska logoHaali Media Splitter: Official Site Down

Published by & filed under Codecs, News. Last updated .

HTPC related sites and resources seem to be drop­ping like flies at the moment. First[int­link id=“1918” type=“post”]Media Cen­ter Stu­dio disappeared[/intlink], then [int­link id=“2141” type=“post”]TheHTPC.net developed problems[/intlink], and now the offi­cial site for Haali Media Split­ter is down. For­tu­nately the media split­ter can still be down­loaded from lots of oth­er sites, and we will keep a mir­ror here in case oth­er sites drop it. There are also altern­at­ives, includ­ing the MPC-HC stan­dalone codecs and LAV. Links to these are avail­able on our[int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page. Lets hope that this is the last in the recent series of HTPC related losses.

2FFmpeg LogoFFDShow DXVA H.264 corruption resolved

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

I have recently been suf­fer­ing cor­rup­tion play­ing back some H.264 files with FFD­Show try­outs. After a bit of exper­i­ment­ing I’ve found that the last build without this issue is build 3949 from 24th-July. I pre­vi­ously had issues with earli­er releases of FFD­Show that[int­link id=“1414” type=“post”]didn\‘t work with DXVA[/intlink] at all — for­tu­nately build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer this issue. I also[int­link id=“919” type=“post”]previously had a problem[/intlink] where some builds of FFD­Show were less effi­cient on my HTPC and were unable to smoothly decode some high bitrate movies, e.g. a rip of the Inglori­ous Bas­terds Blu-Ray, which has forced me to con­tin­ue to use an old build from mid-2010 until now. Build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer from these issues either — so in terms of the 3 prob­lems I’ve had over the years with ffd­show, build 3949 does­n’t suf­fer from any of them, mak­ing it my build of choice for the fore­see­able future.

0FFmpeg Logoffdshow DXVA fixed

Published by & filed under Codecs, News. Last updated .

DXVA in ffd­show, which was [int­link id=“937” type=“post”]broken for the last few builds[/intlink], appears to have been fixed, at least in the 3878 x64 build from 11th June.

0FFmpeg LogoUnsolved: Decoding interlaced vc1 in Media Center x64

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

Whilst my MediaPC setup can decode just about everything thrown at it, I have had prob­lems decod­ing inter­laced VC1 con­tent. The prob­lem is caused by the fail­ure of ffm­peg to sup­port inter­laced vc1. Whilst there are oth­er codecs (e.g. cyber­link or arc­soft) these are cur­rently not avail­able as x64. Cyber­link do have an x64 codec for h.264 and mpeg2, but I haven’t been able to get it to work with VC1 con­tent. Hope­fully ffm­peg will fix inter­laced vc1 sup­port soon, but as its been on the to do list for over 2 years I’m not hold­ing my breath

0FFmpeg LogoLAV — A new splitter

Published by & filed under Codecs. Last updated .

A new dir­ect­show split­ter has become avail­able. If you’re not happy with the offer­ings from Haali and Gabest then you might like to try LAV.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, so I can­’t cur­rently offer any more inform­a­tion. It does men­tion split­ting wtv files though, so I will be try­ing it in the near future.
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