DXVA not as good as XBMC's?

[lettcco]

Hi,

I have been using boxee beta for a month now, for the most part I thought it's pretty good, since it can play all my mkvs from my server without too much problems. However, when it comes to detailed scenes (such as the famous Planet Earth "birds scene", seems like couple of frames are dropped here and there (still watchable, but definitely noticeable.)

Yesterday I heard that XBMC now also support DXVA and I gave it a shot--apart from the initial microblocks for 2-3 seconds, it clears up and does not have any problem over the detailed scenes.

Does anyone has similar experiences?
In XBMC when you press "O" it will show you if you are dropping frames or not...anyone know how to do that with Boxee?

I am using ACER R3610 which has N330, 2GB and ION build in.

[funkyg73]

I have been experiencing this as well. I took a break from Boxee for a bit.. figured I'd return once they got some of the gpu decoding kinks worked out in Beta. I have mostly been using XBMC with DXVA enabled. This works very well on my Zotac Mag Ion based htpc.

I just gave Boxee (10711) another look, and the playback problems still exist for me with both 720p and 1080p H.264 mkv's. I don't have any crashes, or files that fail to play, but the video is ever so slightly jerky ... just enough to drive me ape. This is mostly evident in scenes where the camera pans across large landscapes. Watching the same videos in XBMC with DXVA has been more successful. I prefer Boxee's interface, so I'm crossing my fingers that this gets resolved.

[CRSharff]

I have been experiencing this as well. I took a break from Boxee for a bit.. figured I'd return once they got some of the gpu decoding kinks worked out in Beta. I have mostly been using XBMC with DXVA enabled. This works very well on my Zotac Mag Ion based htpc.

I just gave Boxee (10711) another look, and the playback problems still exist for me with both 720p and 1080p H.264 mkv's. I don't have any crashes, or files that fail to play, but the video is ever so slightly jerky ... just enough to drive me ape. This is mostly evident in scenes where the camera pans across large landscapes. Watching the same videos in XBMC with DXVA has been more successful. I prefer Boxee's interface, so I'm crossing my fingers that this gets resolved.

Glad I am not the only one experiencing these issues, I have also noticed that that when playing mkvs under Boxee that it feels like it just doesn't have enough oomph to play them smooth. I will have to check out XBMC. I know that MediaBrowser played them very smooth so seems to be a problem with Boxee or GPU acceleration on ATI?

[judgeschambers]

I've not had any issues with 720p H264 MP4 or 720P MKV files in general with boxee. (using my Revo 3610 w/Win-7 64).

I was told a few weeks ago that DXVA acceleration is not completely working in Boxee just yet. A 1080p MKV file will lag big time in Boxee and hit the CPU pretty good. Which confirms that GPU acceleration is not working just yet for that file type.

Though the Wiki shows that H264 mp4 is supported in Vista and Win-7. I do not have a H264 mp4 1080P file to test myself, only 720P....

Odd how I've read different user experiences with similar hardware.

[Rulo]

To follow up with CRSharff I have experience bad video quality in my Radeon HD4200 inside the 785G AMD chipset. I have not tried high definition since I have none. My movie library is composed of several hundred DVD's ripped into MKV using Handbrake. The issue in my case is lots of jaggies. All the videos have the same problem. The thing is that XBMC also presents the same problem. When I tried them on my WDTV they work fine. My idea was to just have my HTPC replace my WDTV (1st gen). Hopefully they can implement DXVA better.

[thewusman]

Just following up on this thread and adding my recent observations.

I became the owner of a Asus EB1501 (dual core atom, ION generation 1) nettop about 3 weeks ago and initially installed the latest version of boxee beta.

The installed OS is and was Windows 7 32bit home premium. Connected to my uber core i7 gaming rig/media library.

On 720p and 1080p .mkv files (which form 99% of my library) I also noticed the "frame drop" mentioned by the original poster. I was just enough to drive me mad.

Coming from a first generation WDTV, which played all the same files perfectly, I tried installing several codecs and various combinations of this and that. No luck.

Eventually restored the recovery partition to a "out of the box" OS environment and installed the latest XBMC trunk release from http://mirrors.xbmc.org/nightlies/win32/ and enabled DXVA rendering.

Except for the 2 or 3 seconds of micro blocking, as mentioned by the OP as well, only on some mkv files, it's absolutely perfect.

So, XBMC's implementation of hardware supported rendering/decoding is far better.

Thought it was the Asus and nearly returned it.

Hope Boxee improve this in future releases, it's such a great platform I can't wait to go back once things come right.

Cheers and hope this information is of benefit to others.