Thread: Play HD movies using your video card

This tutorial shows how to play HD movies using your video card instead of your CPU ... you can have 1080p playback at 4-10% CPU usage this way.

Should work with lots of video cards, even cheap ones.

1. Get Media Player Classic Homecinema [MPC from here

Extract it from the zip file somewhere and run it, this is the version I use:




2. Optionally, Get AC3Filter from here and install it.
3. Open the Options panel of MPC HC and go to Output section:




Set it to VMR9 (renderless) and Surface: 3D surfaces (recommended).
Open any movie and check how it runs. If it stutters or feels like it runs at 15fps or something like that, uncheck VMR9 mixer mode or Lock back-buffer or both.
If it still doesn't run well, use VMR7 (renderless) with Surface: 3D surfaces (recommended).
VMR9 or VMR7 is required to use hardware decoding on the video card.
Now open any HD movie and while it's running, go to Play menu and click on the Filters entry:



You should see there MPC Video Decoder and AC3Filter, if the movie has AC3.
Click on MPC Video Decoder and you will see if the movie is decoded in hardware or not:



Check Enable DXVA if it's not check and restart the player and movie. As you see above, in my case the movie is decoded in hardware and if the movie can't be decoded in hardware it falls back to ffmpeg.

If you installed AC3Filter, click on AC3Filter in the menu and set it to the number of speakers you have:



If you install AC3Filter, go in the Options and in the Internal Filters, in the Transform Filters uncheck AC3 because you're now using the external AC3Filter to decode AC3 instead of the built in codec.
That's all.
Now... if for some reason your video card can't decode in hardware the movies and ffmpeg uses too much CPU, do this below.
1.Download CoreAVC Decoder from here (search the torrents) and install it.
2.Go back in the Options panel in the External Filters section.
3.Click on Add Filter... and select CoreAVC Decoder from the list.



4. Go in the Internal Filters section, and in the Transform Filters section, scroll down and uncheck H264/AVC (DXVA)



Now instead of using the MPC Video Decoder (ffmpeg or hardware) it will load CoreAVC instead.
Really guys, so many programs and codecs pack just to watch a movie...
PS. If you install CoreAVC, don't install Haali splitter, it's not needed.


Source google

Any way of doing this with VLC?

It should be noted that DXVA mode will only work under Vista if EVR or EVR Custom are selected in Output section.
This is a great tutorial for XP though.

Originally Posted by ilt43

Any way of doing this with VLC?

How about Media Portal? Thx for the tutorial!

Is there a similiar thing, or tweaks for windows 7? This seems pretty amazing if it actually works, as my CPU is a lower version.

Originally Posted by enday

Is there a similiar thing, or tweaks for windows 7? This seems pretty amazing if it actually works, as my CPU is a lower version.

This work only in XP