DXVA

At this stage I'm pretty much going to equate convenience with waiting time. Barring some unforeseen herculean effort of strength or agility, any movie-watching process you go through takes about the same amount of hassle so I'm firstly going to measure the time-to-screen of each process and the physical storage capacity required for a selection of movies.

I've got a bar to raise but its not set very high. With Broadcast TV you have to wait minutes, hours, or days to watch the program you want. Loading Film into a projector takes a lot of effort although less time than waiting for a scheduled TV broadcast. VHS is better, but having to rewind after (or before) watching takes time.

The digital world of DVDs and BluRay has just about taken the hassle out of media. You can pick a title and put it on within a minute. This is the ball park I want to be playing in.

For me, the process has been kick started by a colleague emigrating to Canada, and providing me with an excellent opportunity to buy a very cheap 36" TV which I am using as a starting point for my configuration. (Thanks Geoff!) This informs a number of other decisions - the immediate availability of a HD-TV promotes HD content over Film or VHS formats, for example. Given most of my content is SD, coming from Cable TV and DVDs, I would say I own exactly one HD-TV but am using between zero-and-one.

Since this is a HTPC blog, i'm going to ignore the option of a standalone BluRay player or PlayStation-3 console for now and defer that debate to another day.
For convenience, a Movies JukeBox is worth considering. You get a small(ish) unit and you can dial up a movie, on demand, from an updateable selection of titles. Second to this, the amount of physical storage space isn't a limitation on the amount of content. This is what I'm trying to achieve with a HTPC. I don't need to stream broadcast TV or record incoming signals, this is a playback device for HD Content.

Just looking at the mathematics, a 720x576 progressive frame image is 414720 pixels, but really half that because of interlacing. However a 1080p frame is a massive 2073600 pixels - ten times the bandwidth of the old Standard Def image. This gives us an impression that a lot more CPU time is going to be needed to decode that image and get it on-screen that was for a simple DVD.

Thankfully, Media Player Classic Home Cinema supports DXVA, pushing a lot of that needed number crunching onto the video card and allowing the use of shaders for post-processing as a free by-product.

There are reports online of a Core2Duo E5200 being enough to play HD content using DXVA, so my E6600 should manage as long as its video card does the hard work. The two video cards I've tried are an old 7800GT and a fanless GeForce-9400. The first test is the 7800 in the Duo, because its already in and ready to go, but it just wasn't enough for 1080p.

In fact, the 7800GT just isn't man enough for DXVA support, and even in the quad I don't get perfect playback through just the CPU. Testing the 9400 in my quad-core playback is good, 1280x1024 test footage was fine and even 1080p plays back with CPU usage barely ticking up to 2%. Since I'd rather use the Duo as a media centre all I've got to do is get the 9400 in the E6600.

The first test has failed - after some playing about it does report DXVA playback although CPU Usage reaches 45% and playback stutters, and that is a problem to be solved another day.