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[lalittle]

You may be right.  We're not ruling it out.  But we're not seeing this much, so it's hard to believe it's our bug.  Could be, but it seems unlikely at this point.

Slightly old graphic cards usually work with newer drivers.

Thanks for keeping an open mind on this issue -- I definitely appreciate it.  I do understand that this is a difficult issue to troubleshoot -- it's very "particular" about the conditions under which it shows itself.  Unfortunately, these conditions are occuring on the system I need it to work on.

I'm remaining hopeful that you guys will have a chance to look into this, and that the problem will reveal itself.

Thanks again,

Larry

[Matt]

I'm remaining hopeful that you guys will have a chance to look into this, and that the problem will reveal itself.

If you could, run down my checklist posted a few minutes ago and let us know about each point.

Thanks.

[Matt]

Also, could anyone else with an nVidia card comment on this?

It seems fine on an 8800GTX we've tested (woot) but otherwise most our testing has been on ATI cards. (and we've had good luck with even $35 cheapies here)

Thanks.

[lalittle]

If you're seeing blocky text, could you post a screenshot to help us understand?

I'll do this later tonight.

Also, post the video card model (and driver version) along with it.

The one with the blocky text is a Geforce Ti4600, and the one with the "twitching" text is the FX5200.  I've tested both with a few different drivers, including the latest ones (I'll get you the specific version later when I'm in front of that system.)

Try disabling Windows "ClearType" anti-aliasing as a test.

I already tried this and it didn't help.  I actually typically use "standard" for text smoothing, but I tried all three options (i.e. Standard, Cleartype, and none.)  It does effect the way it looks, but it does not "fix" the issues.

Also, play around in the video card control panel 3D settings (AA, AF, etc.) and see if anything makes a difference.

I already tried this a bit, but I'll try it some more.

Finally, double-check your connection because analog connections can sometimes have pixel jitter / crawl. (test with DVI to a monitor / projector)

I can tell it's not the connection because the things that "twitch" are VERY specific -- i.e. only SOME of the text twitches, while the rest is totally stable, and with the text that twitches, the boxes surrounding the text stay completely stable (the boxes USED to twitch as well before the "rubber banding" fix.)  It's also important to remember that this ONLY happens during the few seconds following the SCROLL animation.  Other than this, this issue does NOT happen.  OTHER actions, such as changing menus, etc., do NOT cause this issue.  It only happens after the scroll animation.

We'll look into adding a way to get more information about a card's abilities, because that would help these discussions.

Thanks for all the help with this.

Larry

[Matt]

only SOME of the text twitches, while the rest is totally stable, and with the text that twitches, the boxes surrounding the text stay completely stable (the boxes USED to twitch as well before the "rubber banding" fix.)

Is this in list, thumbnail, or either style list?  Does the Theater View size option make much difference?

I'm confused because the border and text are all one texture so I'd expect both to jiggle or neither -- not just one.

It's also important to remember that this ONLY happens during the few seconds following the SCROLL animation.  Other than this, this issue does NOT happen.  OTHER actions, such as changing menus, etc., do NOT cause this issue.  It only happens after the scroll animation.

So does it smoothly move to a spot, and then overshoot a little, and then come back a second later?  How many jiggles, when, and of what magnitude? (one pixel each way, lots, etc.)

Thanks.

[JimH]

Not true in todays world.

Certain vers. of drivers will work with a specfic card better than the newest driver.

Agreed.  I should have said so.  Newer isn't always better.  We know that.

PS Happy Birthday!

Youre a year older than me again

Dang!  But thanks!

[Griff]

Also, could anyone else with an nVidia card comment on this?

I dont see it. (6150 mb, I guess the same as a 6600).

Have not seen it on ATI cards either.

I have been following these peoples prob. for a long time and cant reproduce it, but that doesnt mean its not there.

I thought that someone narrowed it to somethine like a 720p resul. ?

[lalittle]

Is this in list, thumbnail, or either style list?  Does the Theater View size option make much difference?

I only use the "list" style, so I don't know if the thumnail style has issues as well.  I can't remember whether or not I tested this, but I'll test it the next time I get a chance

I did try changing the Theater View "size," and both the blocky text and the twitching remain.

I'm confused because the border and text are all one texture so I'd expect both to jiggle or neither -- not just one.

I'm not in front of that system right now, but I just had somebody else check it for me, and they said that the vertical edge of the box does not appear to twitch along with the word/s.  They said that to some extent it was "hard to tell," but as far as they could tell only the text was twitching.  I'll check this myself the next time I'm in front of that system, but their response appears to mimic what my memory is telling me, which is that just the text was twitching.

So does it smoothly move to a spot, and then overshoot a little, and then come back a second later?  How many jiggles, when, and of what magnitude? (one pixel each way, lots, etc.)

The text twitching is not "up/down" -- it's "left/right," so it's not an "overshoot and return" issue.  Basically, the scroll animation takes place, then it stops, THEN the twitching takes place.  There sometimes actually seems to be a slight pause before the twitching starts.  The number of twitches seems to vary, as does the specific lines that twitch -- only some of them do it, while the rest appear stable.  They do NOT twitch in unisen -- i.e. each twitching line twitches to "it's own beat" so to speak, and the twitching has a random, "frenetic" feel to it.  This happens for a second or two, completing a "bunch" of jiggles before stopping.  I'd say that it's a "few" pixels each way -- basically enough to see it quite clearly.

A couple other things to add:  The "blocky text" issue seems to depend on the length of the line of text.  The longer the line of text is, the worse it gets the further you look to the right.  On the system that does this, however, the "tops" of the letters seem slightly cut off.  This issue goes away if I change the resolution -- it's only an issue at 1024 x 768.

I confirmed that neither issue is effected by the "smooth edges of screen fonts" setting.

Thanks again,

Larry

[Araj]

(Glynor)
"That's what MC11.1 is for"

The Theater View in MC11 leaves much to be desired. Not bells and whistles – just as far as basic operation is concerned. All I and lots of others are looking for is an easy to navigate more-or-less intuitive display with big text to use with a remote. As far as showing off what your hardware can do, that's fine for those who want it – but I don't see why this can't be optional. While it's obviously excellent that the beta is tested by the hardware freaks who know their hardware inside out, the other side of the coin is that there's an awful lot of folk out there who would never dare open their box of tricks and couldn't tell a graphic card from a harddisk, and don't have the slightest intention of changing that. Nor would they change their box just for an app to play their music. I'm a music freak of long standing and as such know plenty of others, the vast majority of whom just want to be able to organise and play their music as simply as possible. I've had a hard time "selling" MC to these friends in the past because while their hi-fi may be near to state-of-the-art, they've still got an old grey box with a massive usually external harddrive attached and the only media player they know is the one that comes with Windows. When I show them JMRC, instead of being excited by all the countless possibilities, the usual initial reaction is horror at the complexity and it takes a lot of work to convince them that they can tag and organise everything much more efficiently with MC. What does usually interest them (and me) though is the idea of using theatre view to control their system with a remote. I find MC11 sadly lacking and non-intuitive in this department, and I have yet to hear anyone anywhere say they're really happy with Theatre View in MC11.

(Glynor)
"Catering to the lowest common denominator"

I would rather say trying to reach the broadest possible audience – not to mention potential customers. If the fancy graphics become a system requirement rather than an option, then there's more than a few folk who are instantly alienated. Buy a new notebook or PC just for fancy graphics in MC12? Erm, no. For the non-gamers amongst us who prefer to watch videos on TV, the PC sits there until loads of stuff we want to use doesn't work anymore or blue smoke pours out of the back.

[lalittle]

If you're seeing blocky text, could you post a screenshot to help us understand?

Matt -- Here is a picture of the "blocky text" issue, which shows up when using 1024x768 full screen resolution on a Geforce Ti4600.  This image has not been resized or compressed -- this is how it appears on the screen.



Some things to note:

1)  The problem seems to get worse the further the text is to the right.  Look at the bottom edge of the text on the items "Web Radio - Saved Stations" and "Recent Imports - Last 200 Tracks."  Notice how the lower edges of the letters get progressively worse to the right.

2)  Some letters have the top edge clipped off for some reason.  Look at the word "AudioBooks."  Notice how the FIRST "o" (in the word "Audio") has the top edge cut off, but the second and third "o's" (in the word "Books") do not.  The same situation can be seen on the "o's" in the word "location," as well as many of the other letters.

3)  Notice how the lines between the items in the list have little "ticks" on them.  This is particularly easy to see on the highlighted entry ("Web Radio - Saved Stations" in this example.)

Thanks again for taking a look at this.

Larry

[glynor]

Also, could anyone else with an nVidia card comment on this?

I have also tested it with my 7800GTX (less woot) and I can't see it.  Latest nVidia drivers.

I've never been able to see it with ANY of my ATI cards (down to a 9600 XT).  I have an old ATI 9550 cheapie card but it's in my Linux box so...

[JimH]

Larry,
Maybe you've said, but is there anything special about the monitor?  #2 of 2, for example?  A TV?  Please describe.

[glynor]

I would rather say trying to reach the broadest possible audience – not to mention potential customers. If the fancy graphics become a system requirement rather than an option, then there's more than a few folk who are instantly alienated. Buy a new notebook or PC just for fancy graphics in MC12? Erm, no. For the non-gamers amongst us who prefer to watch videos on TV, the PC sits there until loads of stuff we want to use doesn't work anymore or blue smoke pours out of the back.

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think continuing to support hardware as low end as that you described is a worthwhile cause anymore.  And Larry, I wasn't necessarily referring to your hardware.  A P3 900MHz processor with a defunct GPU from a defunct company (S3 was sold off to VIA a long while ago -- and failed mainly because they refused to fix their notoriously crappy drivers) is another story though...

Just for reference, Windows Media Player 11 requires a DirectX 9.0b capable video card with 64MB VRAM and recommends:
1.5 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
DX9.0b capable Video Card with 256 MB of RAM

iTunes requires a 2.0 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a 32MB video card for video playback support.  They also require 256MB of system RAM for the app to work at all!

The card referenced in the T22 Thinkpad is none of these things.  The S3 Savage IX8+ video controller was an AGP2x card with 8MB of vRAM that supports DirectX 8.0.  Also, S3 themselves have ceased support on those chips and will no loner provide support or drivers for them.  We're not talking about a modern video card at all!

On top of that, the very latest games DO work just fine on graphics cards from the last couple years.  These cards will not be able to take advantage of the newest advances in graphics, and will therefore the result will not look as good as systems using the latest cards, but they won't have "problems."  People using slightly older cards with new games won't even realize what's missing -- things will still LOOK fine even without the latest graphics features, they just won't look as good.

Go ahead and try to run Oblivion or F.E.A.R. on one of those cards before you say that.   

I agree with you on the cards you listed, which (while low-end and early) are DX9 cards.  Expecting JRiver to support hardware that both Apple and Microsoft have largely left behind though I think is asking a bit much (especially when you consider that continuing to support those cards would prevent me from having features that I value).

Matt has already stated that making the DirectX acceleration path optional would not be anything approaching a simple task.  Sometimes hardware just gets left behind -- that's the way it is.

[JimH]

Just for reference, I thought color monitors were a dumb idea when I first saw one.

[Matt]

Larry, please try the next build.

It switches how list textures are handled.  We were using more complicated meshes than we needed in the list, so we switched to the same texture drawing we're using everywhere else in Theater View.

I'm not sure if it'll make a difference for you or not.

[Araj]

I now installed the .130 Beta on my PC to see how it fared. PC is a bit more modern, Athlon 1.2GHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce2 MX. Theatre view runs more or less, so I can now at least see what it's supposed to be doing. Yep, it bounces and zooms images and text in from left right and centre. Really cool - if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I don't. I want a plain vanilla, easy to navigate, nice calm list, not one that's like flying through an asteroid belt at warp speed. Come on JR, a nice simple list would be lovely.

I said "more or less" runs.

Issues:

- Same messy text thing


- Had a horrible vision on sound thing where the sound got totally jerky and then MC seized up completely, followed by Thunderbird (as in e-mail) and I had to restart Windows to get them to run again.

- Had two instances of the various sections of the screen layout disappearing entirely and the others distorting: One was that everything but the little display view window at bottom left disappeared (black screen) and even that shrunk a bit, the other was that the menu and most of the titles disappeared, like this:


- Last and also least, when I scroll through apps with my keyboard (Alt+Tab), I cannot switch to Firefox while MC is running in Theatre View.

[lalittle]

Larry,
Maybe you've said, but is there anything special about the monitor?  #2 of 2, for example?  A TV?  Please describe.

Nothing special about the monitors.  One system uses the TV output from the graphics card to display in the living room, but the effect is not limited to the TV monitor.  The computer monitor shows the EXACT same issues, even when I completely disable and disconnect the TV monitor from the graphics card.  Both monitors are CRT monitors -- one is a Viewsonic, the other an NEC.

Larry, please try the next build.

It switches how list textures are handled.

I'll try it and report back.

Thanks,

Larry

[lalittle]

Larry, please try the next build.

It switches how list textures are handled.  We were using more complicated meshes than we needed in the list, so we switched to the same texture drawing we're using everywhere else in Theater View.

I'm not sure if it'll make a difference for you or not.

I just tried the GF Ti 4600 and the "blocky textures" issue on the GF 4600 appears to have been fixed (Thank you!)  Take a look at thsse pictures showing the difference:

Pre build 133:


Post build 133:


I'll try the other system (twitching issue) next and report back.

Thanks,

Larry

[lalittle]

Great news.

I couldn't be in front of the "twitch" system until later, so I worked over the phone with my Dad and had him install 133 and check for the twitching problem on that system.  He said that the left/right twitching issue appeared to have stopped with this build (great news!)  He was familiar with the issue, so he knew exactly what to look for.  He said, however, that at this point, after the scroll finishes, some of the words seem to have "lines missing" that are rapidly filled in.  He said that it's as if he can see the background through a very small "slice" in the word (1 or 2 pixels perhaps), and that it quickly fills in.  He wasn't sure if this was a "new" issue, or if this had been happening before and he hadn't noticed it since he was concentrating on the "twitching," which was very distracting.

I obviously have no idea how "bad" the issue is, or if it would even classify as a "problem" or not.  I won't know until I see it in a few days when I'm once again in front of that system.  At this point, I'm just happy that he said the twitching had stopped.  I'll check it myself and report back as soon as I can just to verify that the issue is indeed gone, but it would appear that whatever changes were made to 133, they fixed both of the existing issues that I was having (i.e. both the twitching and the blocky text.)

Thank you so much for pursuing this,

Larry

[Araj]

Is .133 only for the chosen few, or can we all play? To put it another way, where can I find it?

[JimH]

Is .133 only for the chosen few, or can we all play? To put it another way, where can I find it?

You should see it or a later version this week.  It will be posted on the downloads page.

[lalittle]

He said, however, that at this point, after the scroll finishes, some of the words seem to have "lines missing" that are rapidly filled in.  He said that it's as if he can see the background through a very small "slice" in the word (1 or 2 pixels perhaps), and that it quickly fills in.  He wasn't sure if this was a "new" issue, or if this had been happening before and he hadn't noticed it since he was concentrating on the "twitching," which was very distracting.

I obviously have no idea how "bad" the issue is, or if it would even classify as a "problem" or not.  I won't know until I see it in a few days when I'm once again in front of that system.

Just to followup on this issue:

I finally had a chance to check this, and it turns out that this "other" issue is not an issue at all.  Whatever my Dad was seeing turned out to simply be slight graphics artifacts from the fact that it's a slower card/system.  The new version fixes BOTH the problems (blocky text AND twitching/jiggling.)  Theater View works great now on the system that was previously showing these issues.

Thanks again for pursuing this and fixing it,

Larry

[raym]

Hey guys, I don't want to dig this topic up again but I'm still seeing some slightly rough edges on fonts in the lists at certain resolutions. 1024x768 is doing it on my machine but at say 1366x768 it is fine. As I said, it's only noticable in the lists. Everywhere else, ie text under thumbnails, main menu, left-hand-side nav menu etc, it's all perfect.

Perhaps the lists are still rendering the fonts slightly differently?

[Matt]

Hey guys, I don't want to dig this topic up again but I'm still seeing some slightly rough edges on fonts in the lists at certain resolutions. 1024x768 is doing it on my machine but at say 1366x768 it is fine. As I said, it's only noticable in the lists. Everywhere else, ie text under thumbnails, main menu, left-hand-side nav menu etc, it's all perfect.

Perhaps the lists are still rendering the fonts slightly differently?

Tap "Pause / Break" while in Theater View, and post the "Texture: xxx" line.  It's possible your card may not support large, non-square textures in which case some stretching will occur.

[raym]

Tap "Pause / Break" while in Theater View, and post the "Texture: xxx" line.  It's possible your card may not support large, non-square textures in which case some stretching will occur.

Thanks Matt. The info I get is: Texture: 4096x4096 (0x7ED47)

Thanks.

[raym]

Also Matt, if my video card is not supporting non-square textures, why do I only experience the problem at some resolutions?

My video card is ATI Radeon X1600 Pro.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[raym]

Thanks Matt. The info I get is: Texture: 4096x4096 (0x7ED47)

Thanks.

Sorry to re-post Matt but I'm curious.... Is this what you would've expected?

[Araj]

Just installed .139 on my 2 boxes and I must say it's looking really good. What really surprised me after being told my hardware was just too old is that everything now works even with my dreaded onboard S3 graphics controller. It's slow of course but I can now run all the visualisations in Display View and Theater View. Theater View doesn't dsplay quite right though - there's a sort of overlay effect on all menu items - everything overlaps the item next to it by half:



Inflexible git as I am, I'd like to hear any suggestions how I could fix this and would of course highly appreciate the possibility of this being remedied in a future build for all we users of battle-scarred but trusty Thinkpads. Failing that, I still stubbornly maintain the opinion that an alternative Theater View menu with simple large text lists and a minimum of graphics would be a good idea.

Apart from that I have no gripes apart from an error which appears occasionally on both my boxes while navigating in Theater View: black screen with "Error starting Direct3D engine (error creating Direct3D device (0x8876017C))".

Keep up the good work! I love MC to bits

[Araj]

Now on .147 and now I understand what this twitching issue in Theater View means. Didn't have it up to .138, but now I do...

My previous post in this thread on overlapping graphics in Theater View didn't provoke any kind of response. It would be nice to hear something anyway, just so I know someone actually read it at least. It's a bit dispiriting when you post something and don't get even a non-committal reply.... I know you're busy guys, but if you really want to see what Joe User considers a bug posted here, then an acknowledgement, however brief, seems like a good idea.