DV Playback in hardware now?

[Storm]

I downloaded the Windows Media Player 7 (beta) a couple of days ago, and I noticed that DV files are hardware accelerated in it. A 720x486 DV plays at full 30fps under Win2k instead of loading my cpu up like crazy. In fact the CPU usage is only about 50-65%. Even better than DVD playback. At least M$ is doing Something good nowdays. (I don't like the player itself though.. too cluttered with useless features.. like always.)

PS: Maybe this belongs in the Desktop Video forum, but I'm using a G400MAX, and my video editing doesn't involve any capturing. (It's just stuff made in 3d apps.)

[Damien Green]

How do you mean Hardware accelerated - I presume you mean it makes use of the motion compensation feature of Matrox boards - remeber like most cards - Matros G400's do not support full hardware decoding, just a few features that speed up playback, your cpu should still be loaded with the brunt of the decoding process.

[Storm]

That's what I meant. HWMC definitely offloads a lot of the cpu. In Win98 with the old version of the media player, DV files were played at around 10-15 fps if not less. I thought the Matrox cards didn't support HWMC for DV files.. but with the new version of the player my CPU is only used about 60% and it plays perfectly fine.

[Haig]

Our cards do not support motion comp. AFAIK, only the ATI AIW cards support it.

Haig

[Storm]

So then DV partially accelerated through hardware would be just general acceleration? (either way it wasn't there before. It's definitely a useful feature to have.)

PS. Isn't motion compensation basically predicting/approximating the next picture block based on the direction of motion vectors from the previous frame? I thought the Matrox cards had that. Hm..

[Rags]

Hi Storm,

Using the DVD player that is bundled with the G400, my CPU usage is right around 30-40%, much better than the 60% of the DV player.

Rags

[Haig]

Motion comp is based on the MPEG compression scheme, so your definition is correct. However, motion comp can be acheived with either in software or in hardware.

Our cards do not have this support so this new MP must be using software motion comp regardless of what graphic card you use.

Haig

[Storm]

Rags,
Heh, my DVD config could use some tweaking right now, and I can't really say I quit too many background apps before looking at the CPU usage. It Plays. Recently, I learned to be happy with that, now that I discovered that G400 + Maya compatibility is even worse in Win2k. (Maya = expensive 3D app.) I *hope* it's just the early drivers. I work on SGIs at work, but I also used to do some work at home just to speed everything up a little. I don't expect Matrox to fix the bugs in Maya, since the G400 isn't a very good card to use with it anyways, but I noticed they fixed the 3D Studio bugs in OpenGL, so there's still hope.

Haig,
I think what they added to MP7 is just normal "video acceleration" of DV format, just like any MPEG1/AVI video. That would explain the 50-65% cpu usage, since the cpu only decodes the video, but the videocard draws it on the screen with the overlay. DV is a very popular format, for those without the Marvel G400 and MJPEG, perhaps it could be an alternate encoding solution.

Oh well, thanks for your input everyone.

=Storm=