As you know, some anime have heavy animations to an extent it made it slow, with 60-100% CPU load.

So the solution is one: to use every resource available to make sure we can offload the resource used to watch anime onto something more powerful. What I have is HD4650, and that card supports DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration). This is very useful for anyone who want to multi-task, and want more processing power to do whatever job at hand while watching anime.

So, here’s what you should do to watch using DXVA and use your graphic card full power.

What you need: DXVA capable card and K-Lite Codec Pack

#1 Make sure your card have DXVA enabled for them. Use the correct driver!

To know if your card has DXVA or not, you can download DXVA checker from this page.

Here’s what it will look like if your card supports DXVA:

What you'll see in it

If your card is from 2008 up, HD 3xxx seies and above, or 8000 series (for NVIDIA), you’ll set to go. Other than that, you have to check using DXVA checker given above.

#2 Installing K-Lite Codec Pack

This is the good part. Installing this pack will enable you to watch anime using the full power of your card.

I am using K-Lite Codec Pack version 5.6.1 (FULL) and you can get it using the link above (version 5 Jan 2010).

Here’s what you’ll see first:

Just click next until you found this:

Tick the box ‘enable internal decoders for H.264 video’.

And after that:

Make sure you associate the codec pack with Media Player Classic and not Windows Media Player (WMP).

Click next until you finish the installation (don’t change anything).

After that, open up your Media Player Classic in K-Lite Codec Pack, right click in an empty area, then click options (or just press O, it will open up your options).

Go to Playback > Output and choose VMR9 (renderless) if you are on Windows XP or EVR if you are on Vista or Windows 7.

If you are on ATI card, make sure your ‘Alternative VSync’ is ticked too.

After that (still in Options), go to Subtitles and change your maximum texture resolution to Desktop and make sure your Allow Animation when buffering is ticked but your ‘Round up to power of two’ is not checked (refer to the following screenshot):

After that, go to Default Style under Subtitles and make sure your ‘Position subtitles relatives to the video frame’ is ticked. Look below:

And that’s it!

You can see the difference between DXVA enabled with DXVA disabled below:

Using DXVA, your CPU load is little, compared to watching anime with DXVA disabled:

You’ll now have a media player capable of playing h.264 using your GPU. It’s easy isn’t it? I must thank Ranpha for introducing me to this incredible feature few months back.

If you have problems using this guide, please leave a comment so that I can help you.

- Alpha