wmp11 final does not play hi definition video properly

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Clive - 03 Jun 2007 19:03 GMT

Hi,

After downloading wmp11 final, I have been using it for a while now and if I
try to play a hi definition movie 720p or 1080p I get about 2 or 3 frames per
second at most. Having thought it could be my old installation of windows I
have just done a clean install and am still having the same problem. I
installed wmp11 beta and the hi definition movies play perfectly fine. After
a lot of hunting around the internet and my PC i found that "WMVDECOD.dll" is
responsible for playback of movies. I tried copying the dll from the beta
install to wmp11 final but it just crashes. I have also changed the "Use
video mixing renderer" settings in wmp11 and enabled/disabled "Use DirectX
acceleration" but still the video does not play properly. I am thinking that
this is a bug in the final release of wmp11 as it works fine in the beta
version.

The version of the WMVDECOD.dll that works with the beta is 11.0.5358.4827,
but the final version 11.0.5721.5145, does not.

Could someone shed some light on the subject?

Reply to this Message

Mike Poz [MSFT] - 07 Jun 2007 02:30 GMT

Hi Clive,

Can you point us to the offending content? Is it available somewhere on
the internet for download so that we can investigate?

Signature

Thanks!
Mike Poz [MSFT]
--------------------
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 22 lines]
>
> Could someone shed some light on the subject?

Reply to this Message

Clive - 10 Jun 2007 14:26 GMT

It does this using pretty much any movie that is about 3000kb/s or more
usually 720p/1080p movies. I have tried the Terminator 2 and Discoverers
demo's from the windowsmedia site and they both play at about 2 frames per
second on wmp11 final, but in wmp11 beta they are fine. Just incase here are
the specs of my PC which I think are more than ample for playing the movies.

» 550W Antec TruePower PSU
» ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Motherboard (nVidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset)
» AMD Athlon XP 3000+ ("Barton") 2.16GHz
» PC2700 333MHz DDR-DRAM - 512 MB
» PC3200 400MHz DDR-DRAM - 1024 MB
» MAXTOR DiamondMax Plus 9
» 6Y200M0 HDD (SATA/150,200GB,7200rpm,8MB cache)
» 6Y120L0 HDD (PATA/133,120GB,7200rpm,2MB cache)
» IDE DVD-ROM 16X
» TSSTcorp SAMSUNG 16x DVD+/-R/RW
» Intel 536EP v.92 Modem
» Dual On-board 10/100/1000 LAN
» nVidia GeForce FX 5950U (256MB)

> Hi Clive,
>
[quoted text clipped - 27 lines]
> >
> > Could someone shed some light on the subject?

Reply to this Message

Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] - 11 Jun 2007 22:45 GMT

Thanks for posting the specs, they help a lot in determining
capabilities for playback. Referencing this page

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowc
ase.aspx#sysreq

The minimum recommended CPU clock speed for 720p content comes in at
2.4Ghz, marginally above the actual clock speed of your AMD Barton.

I can confirm that a 1.7Ghz Athlon also falls short, though I don't
experience the amount of frame dropping which you're getting even on
that.

It's interesting to note a Power PC Mac Mini at 1.2Ghz can happily
play 720p content at full frame rate.

Some additional steps I'd take at his point : Make sure you definitely
*have* DXVA turned on, it should help a lot by passing the processing
grunt more towards the GPU.

The next item is to make sure the playback disk drive is completely
and freshly defragmented. If you're playing off a DVD drive instead of
hard drive, go to Device Manager and check the interface.

IDE may have defaulted to PIO on the DVD, it *must* be set to UDMA to
transfer data fast enough for video. PIO puts additional load on the
CPU (as well as reducing transfert rate to a crawl)

All your RAM will be running at the lowest rated speed, 333MHz - try
pulling the 512MB stick and see what effect that makes. It should make
no difference but it wouldn't be the first time contention between
device speeds causes slowdown.

And of course, head off to the NVidia site and get the absolutely
newest drivers you can for the 5950 card.

One other thing - with the nForce2 chipset, which I've had happen.

Go to the NVidia site and look for the GART drivers. GART controls
transfer over AGP to the display card. Without it installed, as I've
found - performance will be dismal.

NVidia have the nTune utility which can let you know if that's a
restriction (as well as allowing you to tweak the GPU bus, memory and
processor clocks).

HTH
Cheers - Neil

>It does this using pretty much any movie that is about 3000kb/s or more
>usually 720p/1080p movies. I have tried the Terminator 2 and Discoverers
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>» Dual On-board 10/100/1000 LAN
>» nVidia GeForce FX 5950U (256MB)

------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

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Clive - 24 Jun 2007 14:50 GMT

Hi Neil,

I can understand where you're coming from with the PC specs but as far as
i'm aware Athlon XP's are not based on actual GHz clock speeds and that my
Athlon XP 3000+ is pretty like for like with a P4. Also if it were my
hardware I can't understand why the videos play fine with the beta version of
media player 11? :/

I have basically tried all possible configurations of video acceleration,
overlay's enabled/disabled that I can think of in wmp but all make not
difference. I am running the 93.71 nvidia drivers which are the latest for my
card, and i'm using the latest GART driver (v4.36) from the v5.10 nForce
unified driver package. My DVD/CD drives are running at UDMA2 (Ultra33) which
is the fastest they can be. And my HDD is using SATA150 with an 8MB cache.
But running videos from my external USB2 HDD also makes no difference to the
playback speeds.

I notice in the beta version of wmp11 there is not an option to turn on DXVA
but in wmp11 final there is. The only reason I can think of why the video is
not playing properly in wmp11 final is because of this setting. Is there some
incompatability between geforce FX cards and wmp11 final?

> Thanks for posting the specs, they help a lot in determining
> capabilities for playback. Referencing this page
[quoted text clipped - 66 lines]
> Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
> http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

Reply to this Message

Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] - 25 Jun 2007 22:38 GMT

>I notice in the beta version of wmp11 there is not an option to turn on DXVA
>but in wmp11 final there is. The only reason I can think of why the video is
>not playing properly in wmp11 final is because of this setting. Is there some
>incompatability between geforce FX cards and wmp11 final?
>> >» nVidia GeForce FX 5950U (256MB)

I've got a GEForceFX5200 here (which is AGP rather than PCI-E) and
that works fine in the target machine. I don't suspect that as the
cause.

Since you've used the WMP Betas before, make sure you completely
removed the WMF11 runtime before placing the RTM version of media
player on, the runtime had some extra tweaks one of which was to add
the DXVA as far as I'm aware. Just to be sure, you have DX9.0c right ?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A
-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

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Clive - 29 Jun 2007 19:50 GMT

I have directx 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) and i have tried completely removing wmp
and the wmp runtime and reinstalling but it makes no difference.

> >I notice in the beta version of wmp11 there is not an option to turn on DXVA
> >but in wmp11 final there is. The only reason I can think of why the video is
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
> Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
> http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

Reply to this Message

Mark A - 07 Jun 2007 19:01 GMT

I am having a similar problem. Running wmp11 with Windows XP SP2. I get the
same result when running a video of more than 600 or so kbps. Also, when I
change screen sizes, the video runs for a few seconds and then flips so it is
upside down and backwards. And, when I try to use the full screen mode, the
program often crashes. My first assumption was that I do not have enough
processor or video card power to run a higher-speed video -- but if I try to
run these same videos using a different player (e.g., Nero) they run just
fine, so it seems that it can't be a hardware issue. Hope someone smarter
than me can shed light on this -- I have tried about every WMP configuration
option I can with no success.

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>
> Could someone shed some light on the subject?

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