It seems that there is no way to get hardware accelerated h.264 playback going. This is not usually a problem for me, as I have a dual opteron 180 and an nVidia 8600, but there are certain 1080P avc1 encoded videos in .mkv containers that just wont play right.

(for whatever reason, it's only the .mkvs. A 1080P .mpeg4 video using the same codec works fine.)

In VLC they are all artifacts and choppy, and in other programs the video will play slower than the audio, and as such they will quickly get out of sync.

I've tried all sorts of codecs and whatnot.

I think in my searching I discovered that DirectShow is either absent or limited in Server 2008, but I can't find confirmation of this anywhere.

Anyone know what's going on with this?

vlc does not use direct show, it uses its own internal codecs. to get the best playback of x264, (the mkv's) you will need to get http://www.coreavc.com/ which is not free but is much better or try downloading http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/ in ether case use media player classic from here http://sourceforge.net/project/download ... p&22646901
you might also need ac3filter http://ac3filter.net/project/1/releases

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it did.



Hmmm, I tried this, but not with MPC. Still this is software acceleration, and I'm wondering about hardware.



Pretty sure I tried that too. Perhaps it is just something about this file. As I mentioned I can play h.264 trailers at 1080p with no problem.

Just to be clear, it sounds like you are saying hardware acceleration is not possible.

I did a little more investigating.

The file in question is 1920x1040 @ ~1,4180 KB/s

In linux, which is also lacking hardware acceleration, I was able to play this particular file in only one player, with minimal success. I was dropping frames and with time the audio would go out of sync, but restarting from the same point would fix it temporarily. This is the only way I can play this particular file...

However, I have no issues with another 1080p file which is also in an mkv file which is also containing an avc1 video in any player / os. Perhaps it is because this one was a more modest 1920x916 @ 1,040 KB/s.

I guess that does't really prove anything. I'm having trouble finding equivalent 1080p content to test my computers capabilities against.

Bump

CoreAVC sure does work well.



So can anyone confirm if it is feasible? I know that hardware acceleration isn't working, but I'm wondering if it SHOULD be working anyway.

I know my hardware supports it, but it seems my OS does not. Can anyone confirm?