MKV file will not play on one PC

Wobitancrawfodi said:

Ok, wrong terminology.

The codec id of the file is V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC

So if I can play any file with the codec id V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC then I should be able to play all files with the same codec id. If I can play other files of the same codec id then either the player has support built in or I have independently installed the codec?

A player such as VLC uses its own built-in codecs in order to work its way around problems related to codecs like missing codecs, installed buggy/outdated versions of codecs or broken codec installations, and misconfigured codecs. I'm not sure if Potplayer also does this, or partially does this, or whether some codecs are installed or (re)configured during the installation procedure of Potplayer, as I never felt the need to even try it out. There might be issues with the internal renderer that it uses, or with how exactly it handles (some) external renderer(s), I don't know.

The only renderer I've been using for the past 8 years or probably longer is madVR (by madshi). It has been working seamlessly together with MPC-HC x64 (by clsid2 et al.) built-in LAV Splitter (by nevcairiel) and the LAV Video decoder that it uses (with the default setting of 'DXVA2 copyback' for the hardware acceleration method, and keeping the HEVC checkbox for it in the decoder's settings window checked...) for such a very long time now, that I actually lost track of how long. People use this with their multithousand dollar cinema projectors and their multithousand dollar multichannel audio setups. It was the proverbial rock in the ocean, like a milestone achievement had been brought to the HTPC enthusiast community─and it still is.

Callender said:

Sample would be great. Absolutely no need to install LAV Filters with PotPlayer. I just have LAV installed to use with another player and can easily switch back to PotPlayer defaults. It might be worth trying Haali Splitter though as it's specifically for .mkv.

RE: VLC. I dumped it because there's no MadVR support.

RE: Install 32bit PotPlayer (compatibilty issues)

I got that info from a website that is currently down or has moved.

EDIT: Possibly it actually meant that at the time of writing MadVR was only available in 32bit so 32bit PotPlayer was needed.
There is now a 64bit version of MadVR so maybe no compatibilty issues with 64bit PotPayer exist.

Here's the archived version:

PotPlayer - PotPlayer installation, configuration and optimization wiki

Haali Media Splitter has been deprecated many years ago. But, on very old hardware such as my Intel Core 2 Duo Centrino2 laptop with an Nividia GeForce 9800GTX, using Haali Media Splitter in cohort with the LAV CUVID video decoder was the only way for me to get judder-free playback of 1080p x264 MKV files. This was on Windows Vista and the early years of Windows 7, around the time when madVR was still too buggy for it to be used as the renderer so in those days I was using the EVR Custom Presenter, which is one of the internal renderer choices in MPC-HC. Just be aware that, unlike LAV Splitter, Haali Media Splitter does not fully decode streams. Not many people know this, and you'd have to dig very deep into the old archives of the Doom9 forum to learn from Hendrik (nevcairiel) himself, but LAV Splitter is specifically designed to achieve FULL support of the Matroska container format, as that in fact was the main important thing that actually drove him to develop LAV Splitter.

However, when talking about using different renderers... renderers are not the same as splitters. Here's a link to an old document that could help shed a few answers as to what might be going on in that department:
http://madshi.net/89notesForDevs.pdf

Here is the link to the sample file... Upload files for free - The Old Guard (2020) - 2160p (1)-002.mkv - ufile.io

If you look at the video display height it's 1628, and the video pixel height is 1608. If you change the pixel height to be the same as the display height it breaks playback on my PC.

Wobitancrawfodi said:

Here is the link to the sample file... Upload files for free - The Old Guard (2020) - 2160p (1)-002.mkv - ufile.io

If you look at the video display height it's 1628, and the video pixel height is 1608. If you change the pixel height to be the same as the display height it breaks playback on my PC.

Using MPC-HC x64 v1.9.9.20 with the internal LAV Splitter by default, this is what I get.

madVR:


VMR-9 renderless:

Callender said:

I stand corrected. Tried playing the sample and it does not play well using Haali.
@Wobitancrawfodi
I downloaded your sample and could only get it to play correctly in PotPlayer 32bit using LAV filters.
So I did a full removal of PotPlayer including leftovers and settings then installed 64bit Potplayer plus codecs offered on install.
The file plays fine even with aspect ratio changed. It plays fine with default settings. If I change video renderer to something other than "auto select (recommended)" I get a graphics driver crash.
MPC-BE x64 with EVR or MadVR I get jerky playback.
Kawaii Codec Pack - MPC-HC 32bit with EVR or MadVR I get jerky playback.

Both before and after I change the pixel height to 1628 by using mkvtoolnix-gui v53.0.0, it plays fine for me with the setup that I mentioned in my previous post: MPC-HC x64 v1.9.9.20 using its internal LAV Splitter v0.74.1.92-git with DXVA2 copy-back and madVR v0.92.17 (all of these are installed by K-Lite Codec Pack Full v16.03).

Wobitancrawfodi said:

I have three PCs with the same version of PotPlayer. Two of them will play a certain mkv file, one will not.
All will play the file with VLC.

Wobitancrawfodi said:

Here is the link to the sample file...

Well, this is something of a first. The only players I have that will play it without a problem are the built-in Microsoft ones

Movies & TV (aka Films & TV in the en-gb Win10)...



...and Windows Media Player.



My VLC can't play it, and FFMpeg's FFPlay stutters badly (I don't have PotPlayer).

No special codecs installed, just the standard ones that came with Win10 (20H2, 19042.804).

@PP78X
@Bree

On older hardware with DXVA2 support, to make it play without stutter in the player setup/configuration that I earlier described, enable in madVR settings: scaling algorthms | image downscaling | processing done by GPU video logic: DXVA2

On a side note: the Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX that was in my oldest laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo Centrino2 (back in early 2009, before Windows 7 came out...) did not have DXVA2 support, hence the explanation of why I was using the LAV CUVID video decoder back then, as that one was using Nvidia CUDA optimizations instead of using DXVA2 copy-back. (And it worked absolutely marvellously with 1080p x264/VC-1 MKV, Blu-ray rips, when all other players stuttered, and they stuttered hard.)