I was trying to play a file with a H264 4CC so I installed FFDshow. When I tried to play files it crashed both the video player(I tried it with a few different ones) as well as explorer.exe. The crash report said FFDshow was responsible. When I unchecked the postprocessing option it no longer crashed explorer.exe and played the H264 4CC file but still crashed the video player when other videos were played. How do I make everything work at the same time? is the "Having Codec Issues? Look here." forum still up to date? I see that the main article was written a couple years ago. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1/48608
Explorer crashing is generally because of MS' buggy thumbnail shell extension. Post processing should not be enabled for AVC. AVC uses inloop filtering and pp just degrades quality. AVC strickly speaking shouldn't be stored in an avi container.
I was having a similar problem. Not really crashing, but when I have Post processing on, it boosts my cpu to 100%. Is there a way to have ffdshow turn it off for AVC, and put it back on for the other files it plays? I find it somewhat cumbersome to turn it on and off all the time. Is there another h264 decoder that works fairly fast besides ffdshow? Update: Actually, I think I fixed it somewhat. Although there doesn't seem to be much decrease in cpu usage, turning off deblocking for h264 files in ffdshow seems to work a lot better while retaining the pp. I didn't expect the cpu to be any lower than 75% though, so it's good enough for me.
You can setup a seperate profile for AVC with pp disabled. As for alternative AVC decoders. CoreAVC is a fair bit faster, but it isn't free.
Well, wouldn't that mean I have to load that profile every time I played AVC? That would defeat the purpose of not having it on, unless it switches over during play. How exactly do you set up another profile? At any rate, the CPU usage is around 60%-75% with pp on, so that isn't that bad for my type of CPU. I'm using a Athlon XP 2700+ in case you're wondering. I think it's good enough to view if I don't have any other program using the CPU, so I'll just leave it at that until it gives me problems. Also, with pp enabled, it gives the image a more glossy look, and the contrast is slightly better than normal.
My point was that pp is bad for AVC, it isn't about CPU. I was talking about using preset autoloading conditions. In particular "on decoder match".
Do you know where and how to set that up? Do I have to make it myself, or do you have some linkage as to where to get the preset. Will it automatically apply the preset for each format?
You just go into image presets, create one for AVC, then use autoloading conditions set to on decoder match AVC. That way the preset gets loaded whenever ffdshow is decoding AVC.