MP drops frames on secondary display (MPC-HC does not) (1 Viewer)

[mpurtone]

Hi,

The problem in short: At some point during playback, render time starts to grow and when it reaches a certain point, MediaPortal drops dozens of frames. After this the playback is fine for a while until the same happens again. This only seems to happen if I run MediaPortal on the secondary display (in my case the TV). I do not see any significant spikes in CPU or GPU usage during the frame drops. The problem does not appear to be frame rate or refresh rate dependent as it occurs with a variety of different material. I have also experimented with the dynamic refresh rate control but it made no difference.

As a reference, I configured MPC-HC to use the same filters and decoders (Haali Media Splitter, ffdshow, AC3Filter, EVR custom presenter). It played back the same files full screen on the secondary display with basically no problems (a couple of frames were dropped at the beginning of playback). This makes me wonder, what exactly is the difference between the EVR implementations of MP and MPC-HC...

The two sample video files I used while taking the logs can be found here:
http://hfrmovies.com/avatar_60.mkv
http://ge.tt/6Esr9oG/v/0?c

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Mikko

 

[mpurtone]

Anyone care to comment?
Please let me know if you need more information or some additional tests.

Mikko

 

[mpurtone]

I did some further testing...
The original test was done with my monitor as primary and TV as secondary display with MP on the secondary display. Both displays had their refresh rate set at 60Hz but naturally there are some minor differences between the real refresh rates.

I switched the displays from control panel so that now the TV was primary and monitor secondary. MP was again on the secondary display (i.e. the monitor this time) and both displays were set at 60Hz. Now the avatar clip played almost without dropped frames but the render time did jump from ~2ms to ~14ms somewhere around midway of playback.

I then changed the primary display (TV) refresh rate to 50Hz and ran the test again (with MP still on the secondary display i.e. the monitor which was still at 60Hz). This time MP was constantly dropping huge amounts of frames. For reference I ran the same test with MPC-HC and again it played back the clip with just a couple of frames dropped at the beginning.

All this would indicate that MediaPortal is always synchronizing playback with the primary display refresh rate, even if it is running on the secondary display.

Mikko

 

[Owlsroost]

See https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...refresh-rate-when-using-multi-monitor.120721/

 

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