Flickering Tv-guide and other overlays with EVR enabled (4 Viewers)

[tourettes]

And about "performance". I made a test with DVB-Viewer: Decoding a 1080i-channel with Hardware Acceleration takes only 2% cpu-power!!!! (the whole process DVBViewer.exe). ^^

The performance issue is most likely something else than GPU related i.e. something thats happening inside MP thats blocking the rendering thread for longer time than the allowed (i.e. more than 1/50th of second on PAL). I have no clue why the ATI seems to be much more affected by this.

The software codecs behave differently for some unknown reason (i.e. in HW mode the GPU could be forcing something to be done and MP GUI is rendered partly black as there is nothing to be drawn yet.). But thats just my own thery as I dont know very little about d3d.

 

[tourettes]

After testing reverting gibman's CPU usage fix the flickering issue remains still being fixed / not occuring anymore. Chemelli reported the same. We both have done two updates on our PCs that could have fixed it:

1) ATI Catalyst 8.7 beta drivers Catalyst 8.7 beta WinVista
2) MS EVR fix for Vista -> The video playback application stops responding when you watch video or Live TV on a Windows Vista-based computer

It would be nice if you all could test the two updates and report back your findings.

 

[mironicus]

DXVA is still broken with this beta drivers (like in Catalyst 8.6). I have seen other postings that it works with Vista 32 Bit, but not with the 64 Bit-edition (that I use). I hope that they fix it in the next final drivers...

I am now using Catalyst 8.5 again and as I can say, the flicker is not gone with the EVR fix only. Please test if you still have flicker using the EVR-fix with an older Catalyst driver and a DXVA-enabled codec.

 

[tourettes]

Bad news... the flickering is still there. It was only the ATI AVIVO codec that didnt have it.

 

[tourettes]

Could you guys confirm that following pre-conditions must be met so that the flickering is visible?

Pre-requirements:
- Windows Vista 
- Vista PowerScheme is NOT set to "high performance" 
- Dual core CPU 
- Video card made by ATI 
- Video card must support HW decoding for mpeg2 or h.264 
- use Videocodec in MediaPortal which supports HW decoding and HW decoding is enabled in the codec's settings

 

[gloomyandy]

Hi,
Well for me all of the conditions are true except for the PowerScheme I've just tested and I get the flickering even with the power scheme set to "high performance". One of the odd things hough is that typically the flickering does not start straight away. Things start of ok, but then it is almost as if there is some sort of video glitch in the playback, and then the flickering starts....

Andy

 

[mironicus]

Hi,
Well for me all of the conditions are true except for the PowerScheme I've just tested and I get the flickering even with the power scheme set to "high performance". One of the odd things hough is that typically the flickering does not start straight away. Things start of ok, but then it is almost as if there is some sort of video glitch in the playback, and then the flickering starts....

Me too. The Powerscheme doesn't matter.

The flicker is much higher if I switch to a HDTV-channel (and using PowerDVD 8 H264-acceleration filter). The flickering is even slowing down the whole video performance - I get stutter and tearing on some 1080i-channels. There are no problems with other applications using EVR+acceleration.

 

[high]

Powersheme doesnt fix it here too. The other conditions match.

Im just wondering why Mini-EPG is never a problem, it flickers on all other overlays, even timeshift or channelinfo but the M-EPG is always flickerfree.

 

[pnyberg]

yes, powerscheme doesn't matter for me either.

All other conditions apply.

The only workaround is to run MediaPortal in singleprocessor affinity.

 

[tourettes]

Powersheme doesnt fix it here too. The other conditions match.

Im just wondering why Mini-EPG is never a problem, it flickers on all other overlays, even timeshift or channelinfo but the M-EPG is always flickerfree.

Could be that the MP GUI is rendered on top of the video, who knows as the rendering engine really seems to work on mysterious ways