4K h.265 playback on ANY computer for 214 € - nvidia GTX 960 and LAV Filters, step by step.

Hi, it's been somehow tricky but I've done it. So I just wanted to share my step by step guide because it's a bit tricky.

First of all, DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE PC YOU HAVE. You don't need to spend +1500 €/$/£ on a brand new ultra-hyper-vitaminated Core i7 system... I'm on an 8-year-old Core-2-Quad Q6600 and now it SMOOTHLY plays whatever I throw at it.

• Buy that marvellous thing called nvidia GTX 960. (Yes, you'll need to spend at least 200 €/$/£). It's a extremely low consumption card so I doubt you'll need to change your PC power supply. Whatever you have will do. Mine is 375W and although nvidia asks for a 400W one, I don't have any trouble. Moreover my previous card was a Radeon 6870, which also ran without trouble, and it needed TWO 6-pin power connections, while my brand new nvidia GTX 960 only needs one.
• Remember, GTX 960, and ONLY GTX 960 (whichever flavour and brand you prefer). Nothing greater, (and more expensive BTW). Neither 970 nor 980 nor Titan X support h.265 playback through dedicated hardware.
• Install it, update its drivers and... it won't work. Neither Windows Media Player nor VLC Media Player use nvidia GTX 960 hardware decoder... So unless your CPU is a powerful i7, you are dead...
• More over, I don't know if I'm missing something but VLC Media player still doesn't work after all the process I'm about to describe. So you can just uninstall it. Till they add not only h.265 support, (which it currently has), but hardware accelerated h.265 support, it's useless. In my system, it is incapable of playing even 1080p at 50fps. It only reaches 1080p at 25 fps.
• So you need to make Windows Media Player work with the appropriate codecs. And those codecs are LAV Filters. (Right now it's version 0.65).
• Grab and install them, leave ALL the options the installer proposes you turned on so it becomes the default codec for your system, and... it won't work. Hardware acceleration is DISABLED by default so you actually need to enable it.
• Go to Start Menu > LAV Filters > LAV Video Configuration (or whatever other access you have installed) and enable hardware acceleration in the upper right corner. I've used "DXVA2 (native)" but "NVIDIA CUVID" and "DXVA2 (copy-back)" also seem to work. (I have NO IDEA what the hell they are and their differences, so don't ask ;-)). And also, do not forget to tick "HEVC" (aka h.265) and "UHD (4K)" which are unticked by default.
• And NOW IT WILL WORK. Your Windows Media Player will SMOOTHLY play whatever you want.

And of course, nvidia GTX 960 is more than a DECENT card. It has even increased the new life Lightroom 6.0, which also supports hardware acceleration, gave my PC with its former Radeon 6870. And of course it is a perfectly capable gaming card but when using ultra-max-settings and resolutions. (Yes, in games, the CPU is usually more or less irrelevant. The main bottleneck is always located in the GPU. In fact, PS3 CPU is WAY more powerful than PS4 one, but games are "better" in the latter one).

I hope you find this info useful. I'M REALLY HAPPY with my "ancient" PC... (I had already expended ENOUGH money in my NX1+ gear...)

Although VLC has H.265 support, I always have had trouble playing Samsung NX1 4K H.265 files on my Mac. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina 15in), which has plenty of horsepower.

I finally discovered a wonderful free, open source, cross platform app, mpv (http://mpv.io), which plays H.265 content perfectly and leverages hardware acceleration on graphics cards. No more stuttering video.

When I need to convert H.265 to other formats, I use a Mac app called iffmpeg (http://www.iffmpeg.com), which is a GUI front end to ffmpeg. You can run the open source ffmpeg directly on the command line, but getting all the commands argument right is a hassle.

Alex Karahalios wrote:

Although VLC has H.265 support, I always have had trouble playing Samsung NX1 4K H.265 files on my Mac. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina 15in), which has plenty of horsepower.

I finally discovered a wonderful free, open source, cross platform app, mpv (http://mpv.io), which plays H.265 content perfectly and leverages hardware acceleration on graphics cards. No more stuttering video.

When I need to convert H.265 to other formats, I use a Mac app called iffmpeg (http://www.iffmpeg.com), which is a GUI front end to ffmpeg. You can run the open source ffmpeg directly on the command line, but getting all the commands argument right is a hassle.

Oh man, thank you so much!  I just installed mpv on my linux machine (Haswell Xeon, think core i5, and a nvidia 760).  I was having trouble with vlc, mplayer, totem, and others.

mpv is based on the mplayer codebase, and shares many of its features.  I can play my NX500 UHD videos with no stuttering.  I saw about 2.5 cores being used for playback.

I grabbed the package from the deb-multimedia repository.

Thanks for taking the time for this killer write up!

My power director player keeps crashing so I'd like another option.  Thx

Jesus, Greynerd, lighten up.

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your detailed practical solution. This is what makes this forum great!

Sorry but the endless repetition of the term 4K can cause severe depression in certain individuals. I am also living in dread of the TV campaign to sell it all to us. My WIFI can only just cope with streaming HD films which look just fine. Now I am even gloomier. Technology can become such a burden.

I have never had to think of my computer motherboard/video card with stills and I find video editing relentlessly dull stuff. Woe is me

gmcooper wrote:

Jesus, Greynerd, lighten up.

Hey man I respect your movie-phobia but let's be frank. Future is one and in five years all the people who shoot video will use 4K (or even greater).

I just cannot understand this "progress" scepticism. People (like you, maybe?) said quite not far ago that digital photography was useless against film. And you know, everyone nowadays says that digital photography is just better than film one. And this statement is fully independent of the artistic quality or artistic rubbish of the photo itself which remains fully unchanged.

And even your sentence about PCs and stills is completely false. Have you tried using post processing software on a 35 MB NX1 SRW in an eight year old PC? Cos as I've said in the OP I do... But maybe your opinion is that NX1's 28 Mpx or its more than 13ev dynamic range or whatever other technical specs any camera improves over the former model is nonsense, because, of course, neither of these "numbers" quantify the soul of the photograpic art.

And please forgive my HUGE mistake about using the wrong subforum. In no way I wanted to offence anybody.

Ah! I nearly forgot mentioning it: I am also mainly a stills shooter. And I doubt I'll use 4k capabilities in the few videos I shoot, but you know, I feel quite happy knowing that, NOW, if I want I can... (I suppose I stupid or something like that).

As Greynerd hinted, this is not the natural place for this thread and discussion. (4K and h.265 is not a Samsung-only thing).

I've started a new thread (copy of my OP) in the Digital Video Talk subforum.

I think we should use that thread instead of this one...

ARSPR wrote:

As Greynerd hinted, this is not the natural place for this thread and discussion. (4K and h.265 is not a Samsung-only thing).

I've started a new thread (copy of my OP) in the Digital Video Talk subforum.

I think we should use that thread instead of this one...

To be fair, the Samsung NX1 is one of the few devices available currently that ONLY records in h.265.  And the playback and editing of these native movie files [from the NX1] has been a real issue for any/all NX1 owners who are doing video with it as well.

But playback is only half of the problem, file management and dealing with video editors that don't deal with native NX1 h.265 (on Mac platform) is the other half of the problem

Greynerd wrote:

4K us really bad news for people interested in photography or Samsung kit specifically. This has nothing to do with either.

All this OTT shouting should really be on the Digital Video Talk forum.

Here is where you are wrong Greynerd, while you associate 4K with video, it is also a legitimate photography technique. Pulling decent quality photos from 4K is an advance. Instead of taking many, many pictures trying to get just the right moment in sports, you simply shoot a 4K video and then copy the frame that contain the right moment. For example, my daughter enjoys Taekwondo sparring, and this is very difficult to capture the right moments due to the speed of the fighters and the poorly lit building in which the matches typically occur. I could shoot my NX1 at 15 fps until the buffer fills and do this over and over hoping that I captured the right moment. Or I just shoot 4K and then look for the perfect frame. So this is why I say that you are wrong that that 4K is relevant to photography. BTW, Panasonic makes this the easiest to do with their "4K Photo" function that allows you to "shoot" video in a higher shutter speed such as 1/500 to stop the action. You could say that this technique requires no skill, but it brings capturing this type of event to the masses and my grandfather would say that using a camera that calculates the exposure for you and auto-focuses requires no skill either!

Greynerd wrote:

Sorry but the endless repetition of the term 4K can cause severe depression in certain individuals. I am also living in dread of the TV campaign to sell it all to us. My WIFI can only just cope with streaming HD films which look just fine. Now I am even gloomier. Technology can become such a burden.

I have never had to think of my computer motherboard/video card with stills and I find video editing relentlessly dull stuff. Woe is me

gmcooper wrote:

Jesus, Greynerd, lighten up.

So don't click on the post. Your WIFI and 4k issues are your problem, not the forum's. If 4k is causing depression, see a therapist instead of venting in someone's thread.

This is a discussion about Samsung's h265 video format, its appropriate in the Samsung forum since Samsung is the only manufacturer selling h265 cameras, and since users are encountering issues with the new video codec. This is great info, thanks to the OP for posting.