FastDCP Player on GPU

Simple question like "Does VLC play MXF files?" turns out to be not so simple. To see that, we need to accomplish very easy task - to check how VLC Player or Windows Media Player can play MXF files with J2K compression from SSD. Even for 2K resolution, the playback on both VLC and Windows Media Player is extremely slow even on a powerful PC, and it is far from being realtime or smooth. Moreover, conventional MXF workflow for movie preview, implies that MXF files have to be converted to MP4/MOV/AVI to watch video in any media player. Nevertheless, there is a way to play MXF files smoothly on Windows or Linux directly, without doing any preliminary conversion. Just try FastDCP Player which is working on NVIDIA GPU in real-time with 2K/60fps/10-bit/4:2:2 MXF files.

MXF file is usually a storage for video and audio at DCP packages. In that case internal compression of frames is done according to JPEG2000 Standard and this is the reason why we can't play MXF file on conventional media players, they just can't decode J2K frames in real time on CPU. To use VLC, we need to convert MXF to MP4 at first and then play MP4 instead on MXF.

These are standard recommendations on how to improve a DCP Player performance:

• Use OpenGL for the video display mode
• Decode video at half resolution or even at a quarter resolution
• Use the most recent versions of a software and the fastest hardware

That would definitely improve the performance, but our approach is much better and it doesn't compromise image quality. GPU-based J2K decoding could offer realtime performance and you will not need to use half or quarter resolution even with not very powerful GPUs.

That application can play DCP with just one NVIDIA GPU both for rendering and output. With the good modern NVIDIA GPUs like Quadro RTX A4000 it should not be a problem to play both DCI 2K and 4K at max speed and resolution.

Key features of FastDCP Player

• Stereo 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 support
• Real time color processing, adjustable color space and scaling
• DCI 2K and 4K support
• Export to 10-bit / 12-bit / 16-bit TIFF/DPX/JP2 files (optional)
• Multi monitor support: one for video output, one for controls

J2K support in FastDCP Player

• JPEG2000 batch decoding on GPU for grayscale and color video streams
• Input file extensions: DCP, MXF, TS, JP2, J2K
• Irreversible (wavelet CDF 9/7) and reversible (wavelet CDF 5/3) decoding modes
• Bit depth: 8–12 bits per channel (up to 16 bits)
• Number of decomposition levels: 1–7
• Code-block size 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64
• Option for arbitrary size of codeblock
• Chroma subsampling modes: 4:4:4, 4:2:2
• Color spaces: XYZ, Linear, sRGB, Rec.709, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, DCI P3
• Input from HDD/RAID/SSD or CPU/GPU memory
• Workflow for J2K/DCP/MXF/TS processing on CPU and GPU:
  • Input file reading and frame extraction
  • Frame parsing
  • Packet Decoding
  • Entropy Decoding
  • Inverse Quantization
  • IDWT
  • Inverse Color Transform and DC-level shifting
  • Output formatting
  • Final resize to output window resolution
  • Output colorspace and gamma transforms
• Data output: uncompressed resized image at CPU or GPU memory
• Integration with OpenGL to ensure smooth playback
• Options: video scaling, rotation, multi GPU support, etc.
• The solution is compatible with 64-bit Windows-10 and Linux Ubuntu

Technical requirements for FastDCP Player

• OS: Windows-10, Windows-11 or Linux Ubuntu 20.04/22.04, etc.
• NVIDIA Quadro T1000 or better are recommended for DCI 2K
• NVIDIA Quadro A4000 or better are recommended for DCI 4K

Links for DCP/MXF (J2K) downloads

• Download MXF file (12-bit, J2K) for testing - 2K MXF (J2K) SNOWMAN-DCP3D.rar
• 4K DCP 4096×2160 (14 GB, Digital Cinema Package)