Is it possible to achieve H.265 HW acceleration on my HTPC?

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ZodaEX

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I just recently obtained the new MKV H.265 4K remaster of Star Wars, however my CPU is not fast enough to play back the film without massive frame skipping and my CPU just stays pegged at 99% usage.

I'd really like to try and enable some type of hardware acceleration in order to get the film to play smoothly, but I don't know much about these things. Is there anything I can do on this specific machine to enable HW acceleration on this h.265 movie?

My HTPC's specs are:
i5-2320
Nvidia GTX 750 Ti
32GB 1333 RAM
Asus Z77-A Motherboard
 
I'm starting to suspect that my issue enabling hardware acceleration has to do with the age of my components. I managed to get it to work on a friend's computer that has a GTX 1050Ti. My card is a GTX750Ti so I think I probably need a 1000 or 2000 series card for it to work.
 
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Yea you don't have the hw acceleration. I use shield tv, but i hear the new firetv stick can do it, and much cheaper. Although i'm not sure if wifi has enough bandwidth to stream.
 
Yup any new low end modern card should be fine. From what I have read Nvidia cards are best for this ATM..
 
Try the MadVR plugin, you need to install and/or register it.
It has many different methods to use a GPU, depending how you configure it.
It can be used with MPC-HC, MPC-BE and Potplayer.
In Potplayer it is called Madshi Video Renderer (after the MadVR developer).

All 3 players seem to be based on early versions of MPC HC with Potplayer getting more dev support these days.
MPC-HC while still great has been terminated.
 
This is Forrest Gump 4K on my 4790k system,
Zoom Player nearly maxes out my CPU while MPC-HC uses less than 30%.

forrest-gump-stressing-system.jpg


forrest-gump-stressing-system-2.jpg
 
As others have said, your GPU may not be able to handle hardware x265, but a replacement shouldn't be very troublesome if you wish to go that route. Then again, depending on your proc , software etc... you shouldn't have difficulty playing it in software.

MPC-HC / MPC-BE are fantastic but have sadly been out of maintainers (ie even BE basically built upon what MPC-HC's base etc). I personally do not prefer PotPlayer/ZoomPlayer or any other proprietary player because I've found better, open source alternatives. I used to use MPC-HC + LAV Filters + MadVR + AssFilterMod etc... but now that MPC-HC is deprecated (though still awesome) I suggest the following instead...

VLC (www.videolan.org)- Yes, VLC is developing nicely and will play most things no fuss no muss! If you want certain very, very specialized features there are other alternatives but I've found it more lightweight and capable than most other players out there.

MPV - https://mpv.io/ - This is the new hotness, pretty much. It basically wraps all of the stuff that can be done with MPC-HC + MadVR + all the other stuff I mentioned above into a single open source program that can be config'ed with a single file. The only downside for most is that by default it is command line and its OSD is very minimal - there are no real options menus or anything GUI related . There are 3rd party GUIs that go atop it though so that you can use all the power and config without touching any CLI or editing any conf files. I highly suggest...

SMPlayer - https://www.smplayer.info/ - Consider this a MPC-HC alternative, but powered by MPV and comes with several GUI options! SMPlayer by default uses Mplayer as its backend, but with a single trip to the GUI options menu you can set its backend as MPV - https://www.smplayer.info/en/mpv

So there you go. These should certainly help you play anything with power and style. Enjoy
 
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