Flickering Tv-guide and other overlays with EVR enabled

[Eabin]

to be honest, i did quite some testing because of this issue, but i'm not able to put my finger on the cause. it being a driver bug would be a nice surprise

meh, didn't change anything. would have been to easy anyway.

[MoPhat]

Thank you Eabin

MoPhat

[pnyberg]

....mmm well, yes it would be nice if it were a driver thing (especially if it also solved it...).

Another thing, I've recently discovered that I have "hickups" using EVR, like I lose frames or something...
This is true both live TV, DVDs.
As soon as I set it back to VMR9 - it goes away (or not using DXVA decoder).

I most definitely haven't seen this before christmas when I used EVR as well...

I'm just wondering if any of you guys have these "hickups" as well?

I suspect perhaps the ATI driver, (I used 7.11 guru3d beta before christmas), perhaps this is a new "feature" of the newer ATI drivers (using 8.2 right now)?
Also I did upgrade Cyberlink to the newest build recently - are you using it as well?

And then again I don't get this frame drops (hickups) when using EVR with PowerDVD or DVBViewer...

Keep up the good work eabin!
eabin: Regarding the flickering have you ruled out the EVR clipping bug or? EVR Clipping Window bug - MSDN Forums

[Eabin]

thanks for the suggestion, pnyberg, but i don't think this is the same issue, because they are not using a custom renderer like we do. we use the image generated by EVR and copy it onto a second surface, which should be entirely controlled by MP, as long as we aren't using the same surfaces twice by accident (need to check on that too).

a few things i found out so far (for those interested - maybe someone has an idea and patch for me ):
*) skipping every second frame manually in the custom presenter seems to stop the flickering (this does however not rule out the possibilty that the bug is in MP itself - it may still be a timing issue of some kind)
*) disabling video output in PlaneScene.cs doesn't change anything (aside from the video not showing, but every gui element shown is flickering as hell)
*) disabling the background erasing doesn't help either

so to me it appears like every few seconds MP forgets to draw the GUI elements or draws them in wrong order. i'm afraid this bug may take some more time time to iron out

[tourettes]

Is it possible that ATIs drivers have some optimization that causes MP to skip the drawing of GUI elements? As I can reproduce the flashing bug always when using ATI's video adapter but the issues simply doesn't exist on the same HW when Nvidia's display adapter is in use.

A second thought... could it be somehow related to interlazed mpeg2 stream as dropping every second frame redraw helps.

[Eabin]

this would be weird, to say the least. on the other hand, i'm experiencing display corruption issues quite often when using MP (such that all open application windows have brown or blue blocks all over them), since i got my ATI card.

i can't remember having this issue back then when i was using a 8500GT, though.

btw, has anyone of you tried to turn off AERO? and does this also happen when using a non-HW decoder such as dscaler or MPV. i need to test this asap.

edit: should have gotten the 8600GTS as a replacement instead

edit2: after re-reading this thread, i see that MoPhat already stated that this only happens when using a DXVA-accelerated codec. so all blame to ATI, i don't care anymore? argh, this surely will cost me some sleep till it's fixed.

edit3: can't stop editing today seems like the guys from MPC-HC have similar issues. will check this out.

[Eabin]

the cyberlink codec doesn't show flickering on my system. (neither do dscaler or mpv or anything else without HW-acceleration).

otoh, when watching a HD-channel, i got quite some interesting behaviour. showing the mini-guide didn't flicker at first, but when i switched thorugh the tv-groups, a few of them flickered quite heavily (like 1 frame on, 1 frame off), other didn't flicker at all.

not sure if i should give up on this one.

[pnyberg]

eabin: OK, in my case it is the Cyberlink decoder who shows the behaviour..
mmmm... also agree that it is not that consistent - suddenly when I bring up the TV guide it does not flicker - but the next time it does flicker (perhaps TV-channel related as well?). But I have failed to find any confirmed pattern as of today.

I did an interesting find this morning when I upgraded the ATI drivers from 8.2 to 8.3:
I did a uninstall of the 8.2 first (as I always do cause of the buggy setup from ATI...)
anyway, when rebooting I got back my drivers with rev. 8.432.0.0 from 7.11 I presume. I decided to try them out again before I upgraded to 8.3 - and guess what - I could not get the flickering with that driver version...
I should also say that at that time all of the rest of the ATI utilities such as CCC and the like was not installed at that point.

But still upgraded to 8.3 and the flickering was back - but I tend to think it's a little bit less now... but then again haven't had the time to test that long yet...

So perhaps any of you could try to revert to an earlier ATI driver as well - just to be sure I just was'nt lucky...?
I could of course be using the 7.11 but I got this "red-shift error" in that one - and also as you get the denoise thing in 8.3 which is kind of nice ...

[Eabin]

well, i made a little progress today. Disabling the use of packed textures in GUIImage.cs (just commenting out around line 502)

          /*if (GUITextureManager.GetPackedTexture(fileName, out _texUoff, out _texVoff, out _texUmax, out _texVmax, out _textureWidth, out _textureHeight, out _packedTexture, out _packedTextureNo))
          {
            _reCalculate = true;
            return;
          }*/

gets rid of all the flickering for me. i didn't test this very thoroughly, but i haven't seen any drawbacks to this (yet).

of course i'm not an DirectX expert of any kind, so i would be interested in some suggestions (frodo maybe?) what could be causing this. my personal guess is either some bug in GUIImage and our Texture loading stuff, or it has something to do with bad memory handling in the ATI driver.

also i'm not sure if this can be called a "fix". at the moment i consider it to be a hacky workaround

[tourettes]

Originally Posted by Eabin

well, i made a little progress today. Disabling the use of packed textures in GUIImage.cs (just commenting out around line 502)

          /*if (GUITextureManager.GetPackedTexture(fileName, out _texUoff, out _texVoff, out _texUmax, out _texVmax, out _textureWidth, out _textureHeight, out _packedTexture, out _packedTextureNo))
          {
            _reCalculate = true;
            return;
          }*/

gets rid of all the flickering for me. i didn't test this very thoroughly, but i haven't seen any drawbacks to this (yet).

of course i'm not an DirectX expert of any kind, so i would be interested in some suggestions (frodo maybe?) what could be causing this. my personal guess is either some bug in GUIImage and our Texture loading stuff, or it has something to do with bad memory handling in the ATI driver.

also i'm not sure if this can be called a "fix". at the moment i consider it to be a hacky workaround

Nice finding. It could be indeed a driver bug if that helps. Indeed it would be a nice to hear some words from Frodo about that

Would be also interesting to see if the Nvidia & EPG text corruption issue is fixed by the same code change.