Watching 1080P x.264 / MKV videos completely decoded by your graphics card
An accelerating GPU Video Acceleration Guide
Yours truly is a big movie buff, I like to playback high-definition content, preferably at 1080P Full HD. But face it, to be able to decode such content in a flawless manner, you will need a lot of raw processing power.
One of my more recent dillema's is that you can playback for example BluRay content fairly easily with software like PowerDVD, assisted by the graphics processor on your graphics card. Such a great feaure, as that GPU can do marvelous things when it comes to handeling that content. The problem with 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD is however complex, if a file format or file-container is not supported you can't play back that content assisted (accelerated or enhanchanced) by your graphics card. And that's a waste of the GPU and definitely your CPU load.
Much like MP3 was up and coming many years ago, one of the most popular formats is x.264 (not to confuse with h.264 itself). x264 is a free and open library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.
The x.264 format is often synonym with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. Especially the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with powerful processor to be able to playback such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stuttersm as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it.
There is a way though. Today we are going to open up and investigate this topic, we'll show you how you can accelerate x.264 content nearly 100% accelerated and post processed (enhanced) with nothing other than your graphics card.
Why use a graphics card you might ask ? Well, first off, there are many software solutions at hand, the fantastic ffdshow, which is an open source DirectShow decoding filter with excellent image quality. But for it to be able to handle 1080p, you will need fairly decent hardware, especially if you flick on filters like image sharpening. Another option is to purchase CoreAVC, which is a codec that allows extremely efficient x.264 playback, assisted by your (preferably) multi-core processor. CoreAVC is extraordinary, however on bigger HD TVs you'll notice that this codec forfeits a little on image quality.
Running into CPU (system) bottlenecks or forfeiting on image quality is not something we should accept in the year 2009, especially when we have modern graphics cards that could easily handle this content.
Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have been evangelizing that their graphics cards are the best thing invented since the wheel was discovered, especially for that high-definition content playback. See, the graphics processors in your (reasonably modern) graphics card have excellent decoding, accelerating and post-processing (enhance image quality) functionality as they have dedicated core logic built in to the GPU to do exactly that.
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