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Advanced MPC-HC Setup Guide - Page 2

post #31 of 1906
8/31/11 at 6:43am
You missed the main point:

Yes, initial setup might be challenging. But thats why some guides come along.
However, if its running properly, it doesn't require any more tinkering then your "easy" setup.

I sit down every day and watch a movie or some tv series. I don't tinker with it in between.
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post #32 of 1906
8/31/11 at 7:02am
I had a 4670, a blu-ray drive that sometimes would not play a disk, an older non bitstreaming AVR, MPC-HC, PowerDVD 9 and a 4 year old 58 inch panasonic plasma.

I kept the plasma TV.

I replaced the 4670 with an Asus 440. I started using MadVR, LAV splitter, LAV audio, Cuvid and the latest version of MPC-HC. I also upgraded PowerDVD 9 to PowerDVD 11. My video quality using MPC-HC or PowerDVD improved dramatically.

I replaced the AVR with a Pioneer vsx-31. This is a HDMI 1.4a AVR. Pioneer was in the TV business and includes a video converter. My video looks like film now even for TV using 7MC with no pixel look. Also I started bitstreaming.

Then I replaced the Blu-ray drive and discs no longer will not play.

For those on a restricted budget, $300 for a new AVR may be too much.

But all the changes I made were money well spent in my opinion.
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post #33 of 1906
8/31/11 at 8:14am
^ what, no new speakers?

I need new speakers, my left front has a buzzing sound.
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post #34 of 1906
8/31/11 at 8:44am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nevcairiel View Post
You missed the main point:
Not at all. We will just have to agree to disagree.

I do like it "simple". I like cool and efficient. I like quiet. I like inexpensive. I like "best bang for your buck".

So to change all of that for a subjective 2-3% gain in quality just doesn't make sense to me when I can use your LAV +/- MPC-HC or WMC.

But that's just my approach. I am not saying that it is vastly better. Just different.
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post #35 of 1906
8/31/11 at 9:49am
Quote:
Originally Posted by StardogChampion View Post
^ what, no new speakers?

I need new speakers, my left front has a buzzing sound.
My mains are 30 year old Vanderstein 2Cs. I replaced the acoustic couplers in the Vandersteins a couple years ago. My center, surrounds and back speakers are an eclectic mix of Klipsch speakers.

I am happy with the sound I am getting but I would not give advice on speakers...other than replace your front speakers if the buzz is not a speaker wire problem.
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post #36 of 1906
8/31/11 at 8:36pm
Thread Starter 
The feedback I have been getting was that the guide was too complex.

In response, I have taken a scalpel to some of the areas of lesser importance.

It should be much easier to follow now.
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post #37 of 1906
9/1/11 at 3:13pm
I can't say it was complex but then again I skipped a lot of the stuff I didn't need like MadFlac and ffdshow. I found it very simple to get MPC-HC + LAV + MadVR running on my new system. A few downloads, some installs, press this and that. Done. It just worked. It took maybe 15-20 minutes?

Now, I've got full bitstreaming working through my AVR and I think the video looks better than on my old system (MPC-HC + Shark007) for the MKV H.264 1080p content I tried. Maybe the i3-2100 graphics just plain look better than my HD5670 did but I am happy with the results and that's what counts. My only complaint would be dropped frames in windowed mode. It looked smooth as butter in fullscreen. I noticed a big difference there too, especially panning shots.

Thanks very much for the guide.
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post #38 of 1906
9/1/11 at 3:18pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Postmoderndesign View Post

I am happy with the sound I am getting but I would not give advice on speakers...other than replace your front speakers if the buzz is not a speaker wire problem.

Mine are the not-so-great speakers (but that look nice) that came with my Onkyo HTIB from three-to-four years ago. They're relatively long and flat so they look great on the wall around my flat panel.

I am think of replacing the mains with Polk OWM5s. Other contenders are BA P430 and Cambridge Soundworks Newton HD. Each one is about $50 more than the other. My budget is VERY limited. This isn't my dream home theater space so I just need something decent and even the not-so-great Onkyo speakers that came with my HTIB have been good enough.

Someday when I build my man-cave THEN I'll do it seriously right.
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post #39 of 1906
9/1/11 at 3:42pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by StardogChampion View Post

My only complaint would be dropped frames in windowed mode. It looked smooth as butter in fullscreen. I noticed a big difference there too, especially panning shots.

Thanks very much for the guide.

Firstly, your welcome

secondly, i think if you play around with the luma downscaling options in madvr, you can maybe fix those dropped frames in windowed mode. Try bilinear and see if your problem goes away.
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post #40 of 1906
9/1/11 at 4:49pm
As long as the thread started as an advanced guide i would like to make you a couple of A-B-C questions.

What means h264 10
bit processing?

Btw Why you deleted the
Madvr & ffdshow screenshots?
Why madvr stats shows h264 4:2:0 8bit?
Is something wrong with my setup?

In madvr settings what are these post processing options?
Should i check or uncheck these boxes?(h264/mpeg-2)

Why you use wmvideo decoder and ffdshow,too?

You write something about interlaced vc1 .Does ffdshow (yadif) can de-interlace vc-1?


Can an intel iGPU like hd2000 play properly h264 1080p using madvr and software decoding?


Thanks in advance.
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post #41 of 1906
9/1/11 at 5:18pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tony_Montana View Post

As long as the thread started as an advanced guide i would like to make you a couple of A-B-C questions.

What means h264 10
bit processing?

Btw Why you deleted the
Madvr & ffdshow screenshots?
Why madvr stats shows h264 4:2:0 8bit?
Is something wrong with my setup?

In madvr settings what are these post processing options?
Should i check or uncheck these boxes?(h264/mpeg-2)

Why you use wmvideo decoder and ffdshow,too?

You write something about interlaced vc1 .Does ffdshow (yadif) can de-interlace vc-1?


Can an intel iGPU like hd2000 play properly h264 1080p using madvr and software decoding?


Thanks in advance.

well, I'll assume you mean 10 bit H264 decoding. If you want to, for example, encode something with x264 in 10 bit mode, you can be confident that it will play.

The pics I removed were of reclock and ffdshow audio processor. They aren't that important, but they made the guide lengthy and intimidating, so i removed them.

It doesn't look like madvr is doing anything wrong. Most videos are 8 bit 4 2 0.

Madvr has decoders too, but the video will already be decoded by lav video by the time it reaches madvr, so it shouldn't matter if you check or uncheck them. Maybe if you want to be on the safe side, uncheck them.

wmvideo decoder is a really good vc-1 decoder. Alot of free players can't decode interlaced vc-1, but the use of this decoder allows us to.

I use ffdshow raw video filter for deinterlacing in general.

I have heard an hd3000 definitely does work. If you have an hd2000, try it out and report back on how it goes. Your best bet is to configure madvr to scale luma and chroma with bilinear.
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post #42 of 1906
9/1/11 at 7:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by assassin View Post

Well to play devil's advocate....

Because it can be a royal pita if you are not a "Type A" tinkerer. I think to go through all of these settings, codec changes, software changes, etc to get at most a "subtle" improvement for many may not be warranted. Or even wanted.

But I have been on AVS long enough to know that there will be a parade of people that shout from the mountaintops that a HTPC isn't worth a damn unless you have everything setup to the max such as "X" discrete video card, "perfect 24p" (if that even exists), Madvr or whatever the flavor of the quarter is, etc.

I used to be like this. Now I just want to sit down on my couch and enjoy my HTPC. I don't care anymore about the constant tinkering. I think that the whole point of a HTPC is to enjoy high quality high definition media at your fingertips. Not to spend weeks/months/years constantly tinkering to find some subtle difference that may or may not even be there (or may just be in your mind).

So for those people your guide is great. And for those of you who want to tinker this should help out immensely.

And for those who want to just use their HTPC without the constant headache of introducing all of these variables as potential problems/conflicts/issues with their HTPC I would think twice about opening pandora's box.

Trust me. I have been there. Multiple times.

I should have responded to this earlier.... my god....

Hear hear I'm thrilled with my current setup and I haven't spent any more time other than changing a few settings to enable bitstreaming with the Shark codec pack (works now in WMC!).

For me will be the holy grail of a button in Shark's installer, or the config panels, to automatically make the few changes to enable bitstreaming. Other than that I am finally feeling like we've pretty much reached the holy grail of a fully functional HTPC for pretty much any content... especially if you are ripping your blu-rays to disk as pass through MKV. Even then playing ISO and Folders aren't too too bad with TMT (but I'm about to x that out of the equation except for playing Blu-ray disks themselves.)

Btw, no offense to your guide Mindbomb. It's very helpful for those who want to go that route.
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post #43 of 1906
9/1/11 at 8:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by StardogChampion View Post

Mine are the not-so-great speakers (but that look nice) that came with my Onkyo HTIB from three-to-four years ago. They're relatively long and flat so they look great on the wall around my flat panel.

I am think of replacing the mains with Polk OWM5s. Other contenders are BA P430 and Cambridge Soundworks Newton HD. Each one is about $50 more than the other. My budget is VERY limited. This isn't my dream home theater space so I just need something decent and even the not-so-great Onkyo speakers that came with my HTIB have been good enough.

Someday when I build my man-cave THEN I'll do it seriously right.

I meant to mention that you might want to switch you main speakers just to make sure the buzz continues to come from the same speaker. If the buzz comes from the same speaker you have confirmed that the problem is with that speaker.

Also libraries carry consumer reports. Usually they do an annual report on speakers and you may get some guidance from their last speaker recommendations. Addi tonally, you may want to check out the speaker area of this forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=89

Finally, if you can try out speakers at home and return them if you do not like the sound, previewing speakers is a good idea because you can get what you like.
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post #44 of 1906
9/2/11 at 2:17am
Is there any particular reason or benefit to setting double framerate with YADIF? Does it use more resources than if you just deinterlaced without doubling the framerate?
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post #45 of 1906
9/2/11 at 3:23am
Thread Starter 
great question.
yes, it uses more resources, but it provides higher quality results.
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post #46 of 1906
9/2/11 at 3:36am
Yes! Yadif does great job.
It's the only free software de-interlace filter that has the same and maybe better results than commercial ones( arcsoft & cyberlink).

Just to remind you that dxva works only with EVR.

Lav cuvid+ madvr is the best solution for interlaced material but this combination is only for nvidia users.

Renethx has some very interesting screenshots on his sticky thread .
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post #47 of 1906
9/2/11 at 9:49am
OT, this thread has me second guessing myself. I have always used FFDshow to bitstream all my hd audio to my AVR and since the avr showed the right format I assumed all was good. Is that not right?
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post #48 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:01am
If the dts-hd MA or Dolby TrueHD light is enabled on your AVR everything works fine.

This guide is not for bitstreaming.
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post #49 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:02am
Thread Starter 
dont worry about it too much calgarycowboy, there are many different ways to go about setting up mpc hc.

this guide actually does cover bitstreaming through lav audio.

I think lav audio does a better job than ffdshow for bitstreaming though, as i believe ffdshow has problems with a few formats that lav audio does not. Also, lav audio handles the non bitstreamable formats better, such as LPCM or AAC or MP3 audio.
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post #50 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:04am
Sorry mindbomb I didn't notice that you updated the ffdshow configuration !
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post #51 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:23am
Thread Starter 
the bitstreaming section was always there, it was just easy to miss because the audio section used to be unwieldy.
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post #52 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:24am
Tony_Montana makes a good point. I noticed that some of the setting you suggest had to do with decoding audio. For those who bitstream I do not know if the settings would do any harm but the settings are perhaps not necessary.

Also, in MPC-HC, I set prefer LAV splitter but not block Haali. So far, that has not been a problem, MPC-HC is using LAV audio and cuvid.

Also you have unchecked some source filter. Some I recognize and understand your reasoning like unchecking .flac because you prefer to have Madflac decode audio. There are other source filters for purposes I do not know and that is my shortcoming.

On the one hand it is a service MINDBOMB that you put a guide out there for free at the expense of your time and effort. On the other hand I began to envision a decision tree schematic and some "why" explanations as I looked at your guide.

However, for all the long time fiddlers we know that guides can be helpful and the people who prepare guides are constantly learning. You posted your setup so we can see what you are working with.
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post #53 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:52am
Thread Starter 
I can explain those choices. Basically, there is synergy between lav splitter and lav video/audio, so you want to use them together. An example of this would be with truehd audio, where it is absolutely necessary to use lav audio with lav splitter or haali with ffdshow for technical reasons. You cannot use haali with lav audio in this case. Hence why you have to block haali splitter, or else it will take preference over lav splitter.

Mpc hc by default gives priority to the built in source filters, so it is necessary to uncheck them if you want lav splitter to work. You are correct that flac refers to madflac, the rest refer to containers that lav splitter can handle.

One of the things I love about lav audio is how it decodes things very well. Is this aspect relevant if you bitstream everything? No, however, it is reasonable to assume that you won't be bitstreaming the audio on all your videos. For example, you if you try to play an anime with flac or AAC audio, if you try to play a video from a bluray with LPCM audio, or if you try to play a video from itunes with AAC audio, you can't bitstream the audio in any of these cases.
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post #54 of 1906
9/2/11 at 10:58am
And so the tinkering begins...

Sorry. Couldn't resist (as a former tinkerer)!
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post #55 of 1906
9/2/11 at 11:45am
Here is what Renethx has to say:
As for MKV source/splitter filter, if you uncheck the internal MKV, LAV Source Splitter will be automatically used because it is in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\\Media Type\\Extensions\\.mkv. (Be careful with Haali, it overrides it if you reinstall it.)
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...r#post20624937
Post 438
However, since you recommend unchecking metroska you would end up with the LAV splitter, (I think).
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post #56 of 1906
9/2/11 at 12:01pm
Thread Starter 
yea, you don't have to set lav splitter to preferred in external filters, it just makes setting a subtitle preference easier basically.

I hope i understood your comment correctly.
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post #57 of 1906
9/2/11 at 12:25pm
I was not clear.

I was questioning if blocking Haali was necessary after I uncheck metroska as a source filter, (does doing that disable the mkv splitter and then the LAV splitter set up as preferred would be used unless one reinstalls Haali?). A test of this would be to uncheck metroska but not block haali and then run a .mkv movie, right click the screen and click filters and see what is running. My memory of that set up is that it will post the LAV splitter.

The other thing I am wondering about is whether you need to set the madFlac decoder as preferred if .flac .pcm .lpcm are checked in LAV audio under formats.
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post #58 of 1906
9/2/11 at 12:52pm
Thread Starter 
great questions.
yes, you need to black haali or else it will be used in place of lav in mpc hc.

madflac is a flac source filter, while last i checked, lav splitter isn't. Lav audio is a flac decoder, but before a .flac file can be decoded, you need a flac source filter. Plus, I just really like the interface madflac gives you when you play .flac files with it.
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post #59 of 1906
9/2/11 at 1:11pm
Thanks for responding. I will give your recommendations a try.
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post #60 of 1906
9/2/11 at 1:49pm
I tried your settings. When I add Haali as a blocked external filter a movie playing shows LAV splitter. Without haali blocked MPC-HC was not showing what splitter was being used.

I added madflac and set it as preferred but I did add it as an external filter lower on the list of extenal filters than LAV audio. During a .mkv movie muxed with .flac MPC-HC Options-filter was showing it was using LAV audio. Madflac was not listed.

So, everything played fine either way. I did not test long enough to decide if there was a difference in quality. However, my AVR is also processing both audio and video whcih complicates the comparison.

Thanks again, I will use your settings.
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