Monday, 3 May 2010

MKV’s with Subtitles and now with DXVA aka hardware acceleration!

Last time I tried to get some MKV movie files playing with subtitles on an AsRock ION 330HT Nettop PC if failed. I lost the hardware acceleration and the video playback became choppy to say the least, mainly because the CPU was ramped up to 80-90% usage.

With subtitles turned off and using the default Microsoft codec for H.264 the CPU usage is about 10-15% and video playback is nice and smooth.

So I forgot about this issue and put it on the back burner, then I saw a post on the Green Button recently that sparked my interest again regarding using FFDShow and the newish support for DXVA.

I installed the latest Shark Codec Pack version 2.4.8 and had a look at the new settings, on the H.264 tab there is now an option: Use FFDShow DXVA codec. I turned this on.

Shark-DXVA1[1]

On the Config tab, the regular Subtitle Control options didn’t seem to take any affect. For example if I selected No Subtitles the subtitles would still be displayed. Instead click the FFDShow DVXA button.

Shark-DXVA2[1]

Here is the control check box for turning subtitles on and off and also other settings for text and font.

Shark-DXVA3[1]

I played a few MKV movies and the subtitles were displayed and the CPU usage was about 30-40% This is higher than with no subtitles obviously but not as high as 80-90% as I was seeing before, when I last tried to play MKVs with subtitles on the AsRock Nettop! At 30-40% CPU usage the video playback is still smooth.

One of the movies I played had an external .srt file for the subtitles.

Another movie had no .srt file present at all, but I was still seeing subtitles. This threw me for a few seconds until I just assumed that there must be some embedded subtitles in this particular MKV file.

A closer look using MediaInfo revealed that an English text stream was indeed present within the file.

Shark-DXVA4[1]

Now if only I could turn subtitles on and off from within Media Center any suggestions other than the Media Control plug-in??

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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous24 November 2011 at 12:20

    Hey thanks for the tip. To cycle audio and subtitles in a movie, I use MCE Remote Plus v1.3. It's free too :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. CW-KID24 November 2011 at 12:36

    Hi

    I've heard of MCE Remote Plus before but I thought it didn't work on Windows 7 or there was some problem with it?

    ReplyDelete