Hello everyone, I have a .Mkv file that I have been trying to play using PowerDVD 7.3, as it is the only HD Decoder that supports Hardware decoding through my ATI 2600XT. Only problem is that PowerDVD doesn't support the .Mkv format. I have tried re-naming the file to .AVI, .MP4, etc. However none of this seems to help and I continue to have a 90% CPU usage, and yes, the video plays very poorly. I was wondering if there was a program I could purchase that would allow me to convert my .Mkv file into a format that PowerDVD will recognize, such as .h264 or similar, so that I may have hardware decoding through my video card, and be able to play my video file smoothly with lower CPU usage. Thanks in advance, I appreciate your help.
Also to add additional information the .mkv video is x264 with AC3 audio. Just trying to get the .mkv into a container that PowerDVD will support so that I can take advantage of the AVIVO hardware decoding feature of PowerDVD and my video card.
vlc player will play the files also convertxtodvd will convert the files to dvd complyment, so they can be burn't to dvd
Yes I'm aware that VLC can play them, as can WMP11. The problem I'm having is that I need them to be playable in PowerDVD, which is the only player I can think of that supports the ATI AVIVO hardware decoding. Thanks anyways for the suggestion.
So, basically you don't want to make a DVD or anything like that out of the high-def .mkv you have, but instead you want to change the "wrapper" the video is stored within. This means that the video data will remain 1:1 as will audio, but the "wrapper" changes from .mkv to .avi or similar. Although I suspect that the change wont do anything to help you, if VLC or others have problems playing the file. My suspicion is that the file is in "too high definition" for your PC specs, meaning that no matter which format, your PC wont be able to play it unless converted from HD to standard definition.. Anyway, to change .mkv to .avi you need to extract video and audio data to separate files from .mkv, using this tool http://corecodec.org/projects/mkvextractgui/ Then use VirtualdubMOD to join (aka mux) the video and audio files back together using .avi as a wrapper. Or alternatively you can use this, relatively old, solution: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic241422.html But as stated, its extremely likely that your graphics adapter wont help extracting h264 in any case, so might need to re-encode the video to lower resolution -- ConvertXtoDVD as suggested will lower the quality from HD to standard def DVD. Quality wont be anywhere near high def, but at least it'll play
That is part of the problem, the video is too high def for my CPU, not for my PC overall. I have the ATI 2600XT which is one of the best HD cards available. The problem is that when I play the video through VLC or windows media player it uses solely my CPU for the HD decoding, making it play very poorly. PowerDVD is unique in that it is the only h.264 HD decoder that is compatible with AVIVO(the platform that allows HD decoding to be done through my video card rather than through my CPU). So the file MUST be in .264 format. I have tried it in .avi and all the HD decoding was still being done through the CPU. If .mkv files were playable in PowerDVD I would have no problem whatsoever. Basically what I need to do is get this .mkv file in the same format as a blu-ray DVD. So that when I play it with PowerDVD it will be recognized as blu-ray format and thus the HD processing will be done through my video card instead of my crappy Pentium4 CPU. I hope that all made sense, if you require any additional details, let me know. Thanks.
Phuh, tough one... Apparently AVIVO-enabled codec in PowerDVD is extremely picky of the source material it allows to throw to the hardware accelerator found on ATI cards. Only feasible solution I've found so far is to tweak the way the video is split and sent to codecs by using tools such as Haali Media Splitter or similar and "force" the video decoding to use PDVD's AVIVO-enabled codec. As I don't have any recent ATI cards to play with, can't really test the solution myself. Edit: You might also want to test CoreAVC, which is by far the fastest SW based decoder available, the only nag being that its commercial, but you might find a trial somewhere of their older versions to test their decoder out.
ArrrGghh.. I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to play the 1080p MKV files on my AMD 4000+, w/8500GT video card. And it doesn't seem possible until someone develops software to have the video card do some of the decoding. Anyway, I'd love to find a conversion program to convert the MKV files to .h264 also... seems like the easiest solution righ.
It looks to me that mencoder may be the solution. http://forum.videohelp.com/topic268844.html there is also a tool ffmpeg which is harder to use being also totally command line.. as that has a lot of undocumented features it's probably easier to try mencoder first.
GOM player plays that mkv file better then vlc. Wherever you acquired that MKV file, you should be able to find someone there who can tell you what codec you need, but ill give you what i use and it works for all the mkv files i have acquired. Install GOM PLAYER then find these codecs on the net... CoreAVC codec and FFDShow HOpe that helps
I am not certain if this will help or not, I have a DSM-520 media player from D-Link, and it will not play any H or X264 video, I had a few videos that were in X.264 and they would not play on my D-link or my Xbox 360 so I needed to find a solution. Working with MKV is difficult IMO, the codecs just do not work with many programs. I tried many and all failed until finally I just tried loading it into Windows Movie Maker, and I was able to save a 720P MKV as a 720P HD-WMV, and it was the same size and quality. played flawlessly. If you want to try that route just be sure to grab a codec package that includes MKV.
wanted to add Media player classic will play it. Also with VLC toy around with the advanced video settings (settings, video check the advanced tab) there you have a rendering method you can choose, you have choices of DirectX, Direct3d, OpenGL etc.. these may make more use of your video hardware. Also you will want to get the AVIVO drivers from support.ati.com for your hard, it will also make your video card handle more of the load.
This will be very simple. You have a high quality x264/ac3 content in an mkv container. Problem: MKV container is not supported by PowerDVD You will need: MKVtoolnix - with MKVextractGUI Besweet - with BesweetGUI YAMB Use MKVextractGUI to demux your audio and video streams from your MKV. Since PowerDVD will accept your x264 video content in an mp4 container, then the only thing that requires conversion is the ac3 audio content to AAC which should preserve all the original channels and depth. I believe Besweet is capable of this (we are talking 5 min tops) or if not there is a second frontend for the Besweet GUI called OagMachine which was designed specifically for this purpose. Once the AC3 is converted to AAC, use a program called YAMB (an mp4 muxing utility) to mux your x264 video content and AAC audio content together to create your mp4 file. This way you preserve all your original video/audio and get the benefits of an mpeg4 container...plus its faster than the other recommendations.
and remuxing to mp4 is da winnah. reencoding is not recommended. err do you really need to go with aac? wouldn't ac3 use less power, though like 1% less.
I've got PowerDVD and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (AVIVO HD is on it). >mKV will crash PowerDVD, but you can use any other program like Zoom Player, MP Classic, etc. All you have to do is goto FFDShow and make sure that its not set to decode H.264. I also had CoreAVC installed so I had goo its options page and tell it not to decode H.264. Now when I play H.264 inside of anything (MP4, AVI, MKV, OGM, etc) I can goto the filter page and see that the PowerDVD decoder is being used. However, it blows. My card is supposed to be able to offload 100% of the processing to its GPU and i've made sure to check box all the hardware decoding option in the codec and in the ATI driver program. However, when I goto task manager, the CPU usage ranges from 30%-70%. When I use CoreAVC, CPU usage is 20%-50%. I don't understand how something that supposed to process 100% with the GPU manages to use more CPU than something that processes 100% with the CPU. Logically it seems like GPU processing is nothing more than some thing ATI likes to say rather than something thats actually implemented.
I have the Nvidia 8500GT. When I play a 1080p Quicktime file using PowerDVD I KNOW it is using the GPU (PureVideoHD) because it plays smooth as silk and only uses around 15-20% of my old Pentium M CPU. So the player does work fine with GPU decoding, it just seems to hate MKV files. I have emailed Cyberlink (makers of PowerDVD) asking for support of MKV files in the next version, but I get no response.
Seriously folks, PowerDVD is not a full blown media player it's a DVD player. Get VLC, it's free, not bulky, and plays everything under the sun.
Correct, they are plenty of media players out there (like VLC), but none of them support GPU hardware decoding of MKV files. That is why everybody is clamoring for PowerDVD to play them.
