» VC-1 decoding acceleration with MS decoder Hi Alan,
thanks for a very nice and well written article!
There's one thing I'd like to bring to your attention:
Many of us home cinema people are preferring other media players like MPC (Media Player Classic) or ZoomPlayer because these players are much more flexible compared to PowerDVD. And there's one very basic difference between playback in MPC/ZoomPlayer and PowerDVD: PowerDVD comes with its own VC-1 decoder which can not be used outside of PowerDVD. That means if you're using MPC or ZoomPlayer, you're stuck with the Microsoft VC-1 decoder. And hardware acceleration behaves totally different with that decoder compared to PowerDVD's decoder. The reason for that is that PowerDVD's VC-1 decoder supports all acceleration levels while the MS VC-1 decoder only supports the lower modes but not the highest one. Unfortunately ATI's latest cards only support the highest acceleration mode, but *not* the lower modes. As a result with PowerDVD's VC-1 decoder ATI cards have a better performance compared to NVidia. But with the MS VC-1 decoder ATI cards have no hardware acceleration at all while NVidia has the same acceleration for both VC-1 decoders !!
Practically spoken that means that I have some (minor) stuttering when playing the VC-1 movie "Deja Vu" on my Intel Core Duo 2 PC with an ATI 2600Pro card because I'm not using PowerDVD and it's not possible to get VC-1 hardware acceleration to work in anything except PowerDVD with this graphics card.
Btw, here's a thread with a lot of hints about how to tweaking the ATI/AMD drivers to fix some of the driver problems:
It should be said that AMD's current drivers are a mess for HTPC people. So I'm happy if articles like your's will make them invest more time into making the drivers more HTPC friendly.
