532h and Crystal HD - Not good?

I finally gave in and bought a nice new 532h over the weekend, and now I'm trying to get my Crystal HD goodness going on it. I have the board installed and the drivers setup, but I'm getting terrible performance. I'm using WMP along with the notification tool that tells you when the chip is active, and when I play HD WMVs the stuttering and dropouts are REALLY bad.

I had this same setup going on my D250 and it worked fine. I'm up to date on the 3150 drivers and i'm at the latest BIOS version from the Acer website. Any ideas? I really like this new Aspire but this video problem is bad. Its one of the things that I really enjoyed on my D250, I really hope there's something I can do to get it going on my 532h.

 

have you tried another player beside wmp?

 

Yes, I also tried MPC-HC, and i have it setup correctly to use the Broadcom card as the external filter.

It seems like its some kind of IRQ conflict or a problem with the port that the card is plugged in to. When i'm playing a video i'm getting about 1-2 FPS, yet the processor is sitting around 40% usage. If I disable the Broadcom card and play the same HD video, it plays much better (though not perfect of course), with the CPU sitting close to 100%. So the Broadcom card is definitely working but there's some bottleneck in the process.

The card was assigned an IRQ of '-2'. Is that OK?

 

Did a lot more troubleshooting. I'm wondering if its a chipset/gpu/cpu/pci incompatibility problem at this point.

Does anyone have this running on a 532h? I know that Dell offers this on their Pinetrail based netbooks, but it could be the bcm970015 chip.

So does anyone have the bcm970012 card running on a 532h? Maybe I need to start a new thread asking that question.

 

I use to have it, but since it was working worst that without, I got rid of it. N450 and 3150 chips are already optimized for video. Maybe the new XXXX15 version will work better, but this one is a no no..

 

Here's the issue I'm having. I have a Kodak PlaySport video camera and it takes mp4 movies in MOV format. The 532h will not play these videos properly (cpu pegged), so I really need a hardware video renderer. The bcm970012 worked great for this on my D250.

Is my only option to wait for the bcm970015?

 

Here's my latest update (hopefully people are still interested in this thread )

Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater is the key player in this problem. I stumbled upon it through reading threads about problems with the Crystal HD board on the Dell and HP netbooks. After installing this software, I was able to play certain file types with true Crystal HD goodness (the way it used to look on my D250). Low CPU usage, full frame rates on the Coral Reef WMV 1080p demo video.

After messing with it further, I found that I didn't even need to play the videos within the Arcsoft player -- the videos now play fine in WMP as long as the Arcsoft player is running in the background. How is this possible? Just launch the Arcsoft player and let it sit there, and my other players (WMP, MPC-HT) all work correctly. You can see the difference while playing the video too, kill the Arcsoft software and the choppyness comes back. Run it again, and it is fine.

SO - what is it that the Arcsoft player is doing when it runs? Is it putting the GPU in some special mode? Is it disabling some power saving features? Is it adjusting the default codecs? I need to figure this out; its a challenge at this point.

 

Did you ever figure this out? What are the advantages to the Crystal HD over just the N450 and 3150 chips which I understand are already optimized for video?
Thanks,
Brian

 

It's possible that the particular CoDec you're using needs updating to maintain WMP compatibility. I always use the K-lite Mega CoDec Pack and keep it updated. It registers all codecs available for use in WMP. My D250 doesn't have a hardware acceleration chip like you guys are adding, but it also never suffers from choppy video or high CPU useage.

Most, if not all third party video applications come with their own versions of some codecs, this could be the cause of the problem.