I am running Kodi 17.0-BETA1 on Windows 7 Pro x64 with 4GB of RAM. (w/ DirectX 11.1 (FL 9.3))
I can play back HEVC Main profile videos just fine with H/W decode. But whenever I try to play a HEVC Main 10 file I see the CPU spike and I see it's using S/W decode. I've seen some other users have success when using Windows 10. Is this a Windows 7 limitation? Is there a fix/patch or is going to Windows 10 the only solution? Thanks.
FTW: Added support for HEVC Main 10 profile (10-bit) hardware video decoding via DXVA on Windows if drivers support it There wasn't any mention of specific o/s, so my presumption would be across the board for windows builds as long as you have the drivers and hardware support. There's quite a few changes in Krypton that make it a worthy upgrade.
Kodi v17 (Krypton) changelog (wiki) Keep in mind this is Beta atm.
Might be a good idea to post a proper debug log to a public paste-bin and link that back to this thread while play one of the suspect videos.
I guess it's a driver issue. I have had the same with my Win7 setup. You can check the Main 10 HW support with DXVAChecker. With Win7 and many drivers and my 950GTX i never have had support for the main 10 profile.
I ended up to first check with Win 10. No matter which driver i used DXVAChecker always showed me HW support for the main 10 profile. So i bit into my a** and bought Win 10.
Because i hate Win 10 because it's a big spyware. Now i have blocked the MAC and IP of my Win 10 HTPC in my firewall. Only Kodi IPs can go outside. So i don't have forced update of Win 10 and all of the spyware stuff.
So simple use DXVAChecker (freeware) to get information about the driver HW support for the main 10 profile.
I ran the DXVAChecker and it says my system should be able to do HEVC Main 10 DXVA2 acceleration for SD / HD / FHD / 4K.
So I'm pretty sure the hardware and software drivers are able to do it. But for whatever reason Kodi will not.
Quote:23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA - trying 'HEVC / H.265 variable-length decoder, main10'
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA - Selected input/output format: 104
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA - source requires 1 references
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA - config 0: bitstream type 1
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA - allocating 24 surfaces with format 104
23:15:08 T:2740 ERROR: DXVA::CDXVAContext::CreateSurfaces - failed creating decoder texture array
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA::CDecoder::~CDecoder - destructing decoder, 0E0CEDF8
23:15:08 T:2740 DEBUG: DXVA::CSurfaceContext::~CSurfaceContext - destructing surface context
23:15:08 T:2740 NOTICE: DXVA::CDecoder::Close - closing decoder
23:15:08 T:2740 NOTICE: DXVA::Close - closing decoder context
I enabled debugging and tried playing the file again. This is what I found in the kodi.log after playing the file. I have no idea what the Create Surfaces error means or why it's happening but that seems to be the problem.