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Author Topic: Hardware Accelerate Video when possible - causes failure of Video Renderer to ..  (Read 2206 times)

CountryBumkin

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I checked the box "Hardware Accelerate Video when possible" under Tools>Video.
Now I find that some of my movies don't play. When I click on the "Watch" button, this message comes up:

Something went wrong with playback.
Details: Failed to connect video renderer to videodecoder.


I can uncheck the box and the movie will play. And with the box checked - Some movies play and some don't.
I created a log - lookinf through the log I noticed that the movies that fail to play are "VC-1". The movies that do play are "h264".

Of course my solution is to just uncheck the box.  I post this in case the JRiver programs want to take a look at fixing this.

BTW. The first computer is an i5-2500K with onboard GPU (3000HD), the other computer is a intel E8400 with onboard graphics (G45 chipset). I will try this on my HTPC computers with dGPUs (nVidia Gt440 and GTS450) to see if it works with those.

If anyone wants the log, let me know where to send.

Follow up: this is not a problem with my systems with separate video cards.
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fitbrit

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Thanks for this. I had noticed this too, but forgot about it. I certainly didn't test to see which codecs were the issue like you did. Good detective work! Hopefully we'll get a fix soon.
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rjm

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I see same thing with an old ATI AIW video card.
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dengle

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Hello All,

I'm getting this error on a Windows XP VM running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac.  When I found this post just now, I thought that thankfully I had found the problem.  Unfortunately, that turns out not to be the case.  When I went to Tools->Video and checked for whether "Hardware Accelerate Video when possible" was checked, it was NOT checked.  So, I checked it to see if the behavior would change.  It did not. 

This initially was affecting an MPEG2 file and I thought that it was likely the lack of an MPEG2 decoder.  Therefore, I installed CCCP and configured it to enable the MPEG2 encoder.  That didn't change the behavior.  I then just went ahead and bought an MPEG2 decoder and installed it so that I could be sure that was not it and it wasn't some issue with how I had configured CCCP.  Neither worked.

Just before doing a search on Interact here and finding this thread, I tried to launch an MPEG4 file and that didn't work either.  All of the errors are the exact one listed in this post:

Something went wrong with playback.
Details: Failed to connect video renderer to videodecoder.

Unfortunately, the workaround of unchecking the "Hardware Acclerate Video when possible" does not affect my error behavior either way.  Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this problem beyond the "Hardware Accelerate Video when possible" setting?

Dale Engle
Tampa, FL
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CountryBumkin

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Therefore, I installed CCCP and configured it to enable the MPEG2 encoder.  That didn't change the behavior.  I then just went ahead and bought an MPEG2 decoder and installed it so that I could be sure that was not it and it wasn't some issue with how I had configured CCCP.  Neither worked.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong - but I don't think you can install anything (code packs, filters, etc.) outside of JRiver and have them work in JR. I believe you need to make all your changes within JRiver (it does allow for some configuration) but the beauty of MC is that the stuff that is messed up on your computer won't mess up JRiver MC as it runs in its own environment.
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dengle

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I'm not sure what you mean, but I was just following some of the articles on the Wiki when I installed CCCP and that configuration was clearly not occurring within MC.  It was occurring within the CCCP configuration utilities.

Dale Engle
Tampa, FL
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Matt

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@Original issue
We can reproduce this and it should be fixed in a coming build.

@Codec packs
You can use external codecs, but there's no need and it's not recommended.  We recommend picking 'Red October Standard' or 'Red October HQ'.  Media Center will take care of the rest.

@VMWare
You may need to select Options > Video > Red October with additional filters, and then select a different 'Default video renderer'.  This is because VMWare doesn't always handle video acceleration reliably.  Try EVR and VMR9.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

dengle

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Matt,

So, I uninstalled CCCP since it wasn't recommended and not needed.  I configured Red October with addition filters.  Then I configured the Enhanced Video Renderer and it worked.  Thank you.

Dale Engle
Tampa, FL
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Matt

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Glad you got it working on VMWare.  If you update to the latest, EVR should get used automatically on XP making that extra step unnecessary.

As for the original issue, in a coming build:
Changed: Red October nicely handles the case where video acceleration with DXVA or LAV CUVID is supported by the decoder but not the renderer (previously playback would fail in this case).
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center
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