H.264 High Profile Level 5.1 Support in ATI Catalyst 10.4
The new ATI Catalyst 10.4 driver extends the capabilities of the hardware (DXVA) H.264 decoder, providing support for the HP@L5.1 profile. To play Blu-ray streams, it’s enough to follow the HP@L4.1 profile, which is what most hardware decoders do, but video compressed with extremely limited encoding parameters are often found. Level 5.1 is the maximum available and describes the parameters that allow encoding video for example in such modes - 4,096 × 2,304 @ 26.7 or 1,920 × 1,080 @ 120.5, and the stream can reach 300 Mbps. If the file is compressed in accordance with the profile HP@L5.1, this does not mean that it will be a problem for hardware decoders, since Not necessarily the flow parameters will go beyond Level 4.1, but among such material it is worth waiting for problems.
I will make a small check on an example. Environment - ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 Mb, Windows 7 Ultimate x86, CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8500. As an example, the anime “Apple seed 2 (2007)”, container MKV, codec H.264 HP@L5.1, 10 reframes, 1920 × 1080@23.976 fps. Every few seconds we have artifacts when playing using DXVA decoders. The pictures show the result of the “Microsoft DTV / DVD H.264 DXVA” codec before and after the driver update. The CPU load in both cases was about 10%, which confirms the work of the GPU acceleration.
Unfortunately, the decoders “PowerDVD8 H.264 DXVA” and “MPC-HC H.264 DXVA” have not changed their behavior. It is quite possible that the implementation of DXVA support in these codecs simply does not imply the support of high Levels, since similar hardware implementations were not previously available on the market. To complete the picture, of course, you need to take more examples, but somehow it is worth noting a movement in the right direction.
')
Update: Information has appeared that the assembly of MPC-HC since revision 1819 has received support for DXVA L5.1 with the presence of new ATI drivers. Download the current MPC-HC builds from here . The release has not yet been updated, so this functionality is available only from the current working build.
References:
I will make a small check on an example. Environment - ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 Mb, Windows 7 Ultimate x86, CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8500. As an example, the anime “Apple seed 2 (2007)”, container MKV, codec H.264 HP@L5.1, 10 reframes, 1920 × 1080@23.976 fps. Every few seconds we have artifacts when playing using DXVA decoders. The pictures show the result of the “Microsoft DTV / DVD H.264 DXVA” codec before and after the driver update. The CPU load in both cases was about 10%, which confirms the work of the GPU acceleration.
Unfortunately, the decoders “PowerDVD8 H.264 DXVA” and “MPC-HC H.264 DXVA” have not changed their behavior. It is quite possible that the implementation of DXVA support in these codecs simply does not imply the support of high Levels, since similar hardware implementations were not previously available on the market. To complete the picture, of course, you need to take more examples, but somehow it is worth noting a movement in the right direction.
')
Update: Information has appeared that the assembly of MPC-HC since revision 1819 has received support for DXVA L5.1 with the presence of new ATI drivers. Download the current MPC-HC builds from here . The release has not yet been updated, so this functionality is available only from the current working build.
References:
ATI Catalyst 10.4
ATI Catalyst 10.4 Release notes (PDF)
Profiles H.264 codec. One source of video playback problems
Wikipedia: H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC (Profiles, levels ...)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/92589/
All Articles