Playback issues with 4K M.265 Dlog-M

[NorthGADronePilot]

I recorded several videos yesterday using 4K HQ. I've tried playing them back with VLC, standard Windows 10 video player, Davinci Resolve, and my 4K smart TV -- and they all have the same problem. The video plays, and looks beautiful, but it pauses every 2 seconds for about a second. It's unwatchable, obviously, but I'm not sure what may be causing it.

If I downgrade it to 1080p, the playback is perfectly smooth.

My PC is a Dell XPS 15 with plenty of RAM, a dedicated graphics card, etc, and I'm attempting the play the .mp4 files directly from my hard drive.

 

[Sockeye]

I presume it has the Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ Prozessor, which has the H265 graphics support... sound good by the manual, but in reality this H265 support only works in 8 Bit, resulting your H265 10 Bit stream has to be decoded by the core.... and for this purpose it is to slow.

8 Bit will work fine, 10 Bit ist to much for your processor.

 

[NorthGADronePilot]

Yes, I recorded in H.264 earlier this afternoon, and it played back without issue.

 

[AForceone]

What is your CPU? Graphics card would not matter most of the time as most 265 decoding is done on the CPU unless you graphics card can also do 265 hadrware decoding. Maybe some throttling is taking place due to heat, which limits the CPU. Make sure you have good cooling / air ventilation and no other tasks running in background. Also try MPC-HC video player.

 

[Kilrah]

My PC is a Dell XPS 15

That doesn't say much, need to say what components it has. There are "Dell XPS 15" models from 15 years ago...

 

[gnirtS]

Quite simply, the PC isn't fast enough.

Even the newer Intel CPUs that support H265 playback only support 8 bit hardware acceleration not 10 bit.
Ultimately you need to transcode to play it back smoothly.

 

[jpbedrone]

Had the same issue a few weeks ago and had many great responses to my thread. At the end turned out to be a simple matter of fake SD cards being supplied by Amazon. Bought some new cards direct from a known good supplier and no more issues.

 

[NorthGADronePilot]

That doesn't say much, need to say what components it has. There are "Dell XPS 15" models from 15 years ago...

That may be true.

Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6GHz
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
Samsung NVMe SSD 256GB

It's an otherwise very fast machine, but H.265 in DLog-M kicks its butt.

It handles H.264 in Normal without an issue.

 

[gnirtS]

its not a great spec laptop (its the old XPS and quite low end) but the problem is the CPU - it wont support 10 bit h265 decoding with hardware acceleration. Thats your bottleneck.

 

[CanadaDrone]

That may be true.

Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6GHz
8 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
Samsung NVMe SSD 256GB

It's an otherwise very fast machine, but H.265 in DLog-M kicks its butt.

It handles H.264 in Normal without an issue.

You will need more 'horsepower' than that for good hardware decoded 10bit H265. Also note that with most laptops, even new ones, they reach maximum temperature really fast under heavy load and get throttled HARD unless you under-volt them. There are lots of articles on XPS under-volting, and it's really easy to do, you can probably find one for your model if you wish. 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum as well, that could also be part of the problem for video editing. Just the other day I was doing some very basic editing (photo, though) and I was using 22GB of RAM.

While obviously less convenient sometimes, hardware-intensive video editing is always best done on a full PC with proper hardware and a desktop grade CPU that will never throttle. Video editing also likes cores, and you can get a lot more in a regular PC. If you want to be using all the latest high quality video formats, you will need to keep your editing machine in-line with the new requirements as well.

 

[karlfife]

It appears that Intel Integrated Graphics processors with SIXTH GENERATION Quick Sync video acceleration has support for full H.265/HEVC at 10 bit playback

source:
Intel Quick Sync Video - Wikipedia

SIXTH GENERATION Quick Sync is on KABY LAKE or newer micro architecture Intel CPUs (i.e. as of today, that's Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake).

This suggests that Intel "UHD Graphics 620" integrated graphics should have the ability to playback 4K UHD videos in 10 bit smoothly.

My Intel laptop has support for 5TH GENERATION Quick Sync, which has full support for h.265/HVEC at 8 bit, and PARTIAL/HYBRED support for HEVC at 10 bit. I suspect that HYBRED means that 10-bit HEVC it's partly done with HW acceleration and partly done on the CPU. What I observe is that it 'sorta' can play back 10 bit HEVC streams. The CPU pretty much catches on fire and the video playback is droppy/skippy/freezy. On the other hand, 8-bit 4K UHD, can be played back perfectly without breaking a sweat.

IF anyone has a newer Intel laptop or desktop computer with 6th GEN Quick Sync, I'd be extremely interested to know whether you have smooth playback for 4K/30FPS shot in DLOG-M.

I think that the addition of an EXTERNAL GPU to a laptop, via thunderbolt would be an interesting experiment for LAPTOP based rendering workflow. If anyone here has experience with that, please post about it here as well.

 

[gnirtS]

Not all Skylakes can do 10 bit. The "S" variants only support 10 bit decode. The H versions do not (ie laptop generally).

I have a 6700HQ and 10 bit decode certainly doesnt work - it pauses every 2-3 seconds. The NVidia 1060 makes no difference to it either.
That said, its not a problem, the footage 100% needs post processing anyway so i'll just work with proxies. Its not as if anyone is going to sit down and watch a 4k/dlog/10bit sequence without editing.

 

[karlfife]

gnirtS, I don't fully understand your post. I would think that NONE of the skylake processors (6th gen) would be able to play back 10-bit HEVC (i.e. because they're pre Kaby lake which is 8th gen), and per the reference above, earlier-than-kaby-lake QuickSync implementations do a HYBRID decode, which partly utilizes the CPU (i.e. fail), or fully utilizes the CPU (i.e. hard fail).

I DO agree with you about post-processing of LOG footage. *Still*, I think it's a valid concern to wonder whether you can preview LOG footage on a particular computer setup (i.e. without needing to wait a long time for proxy generation, which isn't full detail).

Say for example you see that you blew the exposure, focus or framing, in preview. What's the point of that footage touching your NLE? A friend just bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s i7 with a kaby lake processor. I'm sending him some 4K 10-bit DLOG-M 30FPS footage to see if they'll play back smoothly.

 

[karlfife]

CONFIRMED. Today I confirmed that I can play back 4K 10-bit DLOG-M 30FPS footage PERFECTLY SMOOTHLY on a basic new laptop with an Intel 8th-generation Intel Processor. Desktops equally so.

In brief, the common 8th Generation Intel Processors (i.e. Kaby Lake or newer) come with the Intel UHD 620 Embedded graphics processor which comes with Intel's 6th Generation Quick Sync video hardware decoding core. It is that 6th generation hardware decoding core which enables smooth playback this difficult-to-play video. Because it's hardware decoded, it plays it without even breaking a sweat, or ramping-up the fan. By contrast, my 5th generation Quick Sync graphics processor can't remotely keep up! The FAN and CPU cores at MAX, and my battery is exhausted in minutes, and it plays about one frame per second!

So if you want to be able play 4K 10-bit DLOG-M 30 FPS video on your computer without first generating proxies, any new Intel desktop or laptop should have the hardware details above! This may seem like a minor thing, but to me, it's not.

This is a great illustration into the power of an ASIC hardware pipeline (e,g, a hardware video decoding circuit like that in a GPU). One such pipeline can surpass that of what dozens of i7 CPU cores can do, and do so at orders of magnitude less energy! Frankly awe inspiring.

 

[Jeremy]

Do you think a Surface Pro 6 with i5 cpu can play back Dlog-M video from Mavic 2 Pro smoothly?

 

[karlfife]

Look up the Surface Pro 6 to see what CPU it has. Then look that CPU model number in intel Ark. In my lab, it works if it has a Intel's UHD 620 Graphics processor or newer.

>>8th Generation Intel Processors (i.e. Kaby Lake or newer) ... with the Intel UHD 620 Embedded graphics processor (or newer) which comes with Intel's 6th Generation Quick Sync video hardware decoding core (or newer). It is that 6th generation hardware decoding core which enables smooth playback this difficult-to-play video.