INTERACT FORUM

Devices => Video Cards, Monitors, Televisions, and Projectors => Topic started by: 5881 on October 21, 2016, 11:43:42 am

Title: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: 5881 on October 21, 2016, 11:43:42 am
I'm sure someone has the missing piece of this puzzle.

A friend comes over with movies on a drive, mixed bag, various formats and sources. Connect to HP laptop with Win10 & JRiver 22 and everything plays just fine. Take the same drive and connect it to my PC based music server running WS2012R2, JRiver 22, much better/faster hardware and the same video is cubed/pixelated in areas. Take the same movies and cast them from laptop to server and they play fine.

The same music server has its own connected drive / library of video ripped on its own optical drive (some straight rips, some with DVDFab) and all play fine. So what is the missing piece here? I assume I am missing some sort of driver or program on the music server as both JRiver & VLC have the same problem on the music server or maybe a service is turned off?  But everything plays fine on JRiver or windows media player or Power Player on the laptop with win10.

What the heck?!
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: JimH on October 21, 2016, 12:09:33 pm
Try switching the video settings in MC between Red October Standard and Red October HQ.

Make sure you have the most recent build of MC installed.  It's at the top of the MC22 board.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: 5881 on October 21, 2016, 12:42:47 pm
I did both, no difference. After one or two seconds the middle of the screen starts to cube up, then it waffles back and forth.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: blgentry on October 22, 2016, 07:56:51 am
Maybe the connection from computer to portable drive is the bottleneck.  Maybe the laptop has USB3 while the "server" has USB2?  Maybe there's a driver issue that's making access to the portable drive "slow" on the server, but not on the laptop?

Brian.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: JimH on October 22, 2016, 08:01:27 am
Or antivirus software.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: 5881 on October 22, 2016, 10:04:16 pm
Both good guesses, however, there is no antivirus on the server and the movies still get just as blocky when running them from a USB3.1 drive

I wonder if it could possibly be the graphics hardware? The server wasn't built for video, so the graphics run off the mainboard. A Z97 Gigabit board using Intel HD4600. Seems like it should be enough to run simple standard res movies doesn't it? Then again, it plays just fine with the movies being cast from the laptop. But in that case the movie may already have been being converted before being beamed.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: JimH on October 23, 2016, 06:54:57 am
In MC's video settings, try toggling hardware acceleration.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: mwillems on October 23, 2016, 09:40:49 am
In MC's video settings, try toggling hardware acceleration.

I'd bet that's the issue.  An older integrated graphics card won't have the same hardware acceleration support that a newer integrated graphics card might have.  If the laptop is transcoding it to a format the older device has hardware acceleration support for, then that would explain why remote playback works better than local playback.

If my hypothesis is correct, toggling hardware acceleration should produce no change (as my theory of the issue is that the server system lacks hardware acceleration for the video format being decoded).

If toggling hardware acceleration makes no difference, can you analyze the files and provide some info about the encoding?
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: Manfred on November 15, 2016, 06:08:05 am
It could be the the graphics card driver on the HP laptop compared to your server video drivers. With Intel video driver I had the same effect on my Haswell based HTPC, DVD material was  stuttering, cubed picture, with NVIDIA no problems , but I invested in solving the issue with i7-4770t and HD4600.
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: 5881 on December 21, 2016, 03:16:13 pm
After some more research this doesn't appear to have anything to do with the video card.

If I play the same movies on the Win 10 laptop using jriver it has the same problem as my server, but if I opt to use Cyberlink Power Player, then they play perfectly. So that would indicate an issue with jriver, I have tried the few obvious settings changes in video, with no improvement. Can someone make a specific suggestion regarding what to change and where?
Title: Re: Video Playback Puzzle
Post by: JimH on February 12, 2019, 10:52:18 am
A friend comes over with movies on a drive, mixed bag, various formats and sources. Connect to HP laptop with Win10 & JRiver 22 and everything plays just fine. Take the same drive and connect it to my PC based music server running WS2012R2, JRiver 22, much better/faster hardware and the same video is cubed/pixelated in areas.
As I said in your recent thread, Windows Server is not supported.  Please use that thread now.