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Windows => Television => Topic started by: mojave on June 05, 2014, 10:34:29 am

Title: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: mojave on June 05, 2014, 10:34:29 am
I've always had trouble in madVR with dropping frames when watching TV. I would lower my settings to fix it. I finally realized (after years  :-[) that "Crop edges to remove visual noise at the edge of some broadcasts" was checked. After doing a new installation on another computer, I found that this is the default setting.

What is happening is that JRiver crops the edges and madVR now has to resize the video back to 1920x1080. This resize is quite taxing on madVR. The picture is less sharp, too. Since most use digital TV these days with no noise at the edges, I think this should be unchecked by default. Many also have overscan on their TV so now they are losing even more info.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Matt on June 05, 2014, 11:28:17 am
I'm not sure on this one, because seeing the noise on the edge of a broadcast is pretty annoying.

Yaobing, do you have a vote?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Hendrik on June 05, 2014, 11:42:02 am
"Noise" sounds like an analog thing. Does this really still happen on digital?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: mojave on June 05, 2014, 11:58:08 am
I haven't seen "noise" on the edge of any digital broadcasts.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on June 05, 2014, 12:13:54 pm
Matt, I remember there was some discussion between you and madshi about cropping edges.  At the time, madVR required cropping to be done at certain increments.  I am not sure if that is still an issue.  Maybe no longer an issue, but perhaps what madVR tries to do to get around that is too taxing?

In any case. he crop edge option probably should be off by default now since most people use digital TV.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Matt on June 05, 2014, 12:25:35 pm
Next build:
Changed: Crop Edges is off by default for television.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: mwillems on June 05, 2014, 05:20:47 pm
Thanks so much for spotting this mojave (and thanks to Matt for fixing it)!  

I set up TV in JRiver about 6 months ago and could never figure out why it was choking MadVr on settings that worked for any other kind of video media.  I have an NVidia 660 Ti and couldn't get TV to playback smoothly at all with Red October HQ no matter what I tried.

I'd finally set up a zoneswitch rule to use Red October Standard with TV because I couldn't get it sorted. I just unchecked that crop edges box and now the same MadVR settings I use for movies work fine with TV!  Excitement!
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: mojave on June 09, 2014, 10:20:00 am
I played around with this a little this weekend. I found some channels on DirecTV that need at least one edge cropped. These were reruns of older produced stuff. Zooming with the OSD in Display View caused no madVR dropped frames. However, turning on Crop Edges caused lots of dropped frames - over 1000 in a couple minutes. And this was on an Nvidia GTX 760.

I wonder if this has caused issues with a lot of others. I noticed gtgray discussed problems with TV playback on the JRiver thread at AVS. This could easily cause playback to work fine in other programs, but not JRiver.

Perhaps a more elegant handling of this is to record/timeshift/live the show in the original resolution, but automatically zoom during playback if Crop Edges is enabled.

I know that typically "new default settings" don't override existing settings. This is one case where I would be tempted to provide the best playback on existing systems. It is far easier for someone to figure out how to turn on Crop Edges due to edge noise than to figure out why playback is so jerky.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 24, 2016, 12:10:50 am
Bumping this back to the top.

Whenever I tune a station in MC 22 the edges of the video are cropped.   

Madvr is scaling from 1920x1080 -> 1844x1036 and then back up to 1920x1080.

No matter what I do in the setup menus "Crop Edges" is always checked in the player during playback.   How do I disable this?

Video->Crop Edges -> "Amount of edge cropping: 2.00%".   Cannot set this to 0%.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on September 24, 2016, 06:57:32 am
Bumping this back to the top.

Whenever I tune a station in MC 22 the edges of the video are cropped.   

Madvr is scaling from 1920x1080 -> 1844x1036 and then back up to 1920x1080.

No matter what I do in the setup menus "Crop Edges" is always checked in the player during playback.   How do I disable this?

Video->Crop Edges -> "Amount of edge cropping: 2.00%".   Cannot set this to 0%.

Crop Edges option for TV is separate from those for video and DVD.  Go to TV Options and uncheck the checkbox "Crop edges to remove visual noise at the edge of some broadcasts".
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 24, 2016, 07:24:32 am
It is already unchecked.   Checking and unchecking that has no effect.   The 2% value is always applied only when watching tv.  If I change this value the crop also changes.  But the crop is always in effect.

I have to uncheck "crop edges" from the Window context menu in the player.  It's checked there every time I start tv playback.

Using latest mc 22 stable version (22.0.21) and using MadVR for rendering.

I have just tested with 22.0.28 same issue.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on September 24, 2016, 06:05:03 pm
It is already unchecked.   Checking and unchecking that has no effect.   The 2% value is always applied only when watching tv.  If I change this value the crop also changes.  But the crop is always in effect.

I have to uncheck "crop edges" from the Window context menu in the player.  It's checked there every time I start tv playback.

Using latest mc 22 stable version (22.0.21) and using MadVR for rendering.

I have just tested with 22.0.28 same issue.

I am not seeing this behavior.  How do I reproduce it?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 25, 2016, 10:26:51 am
I just tried to simplify things.

I am using Client / Server model.   My server was upgraded from 21->22 (probably 19, 20, 21, 22 iirc).

Well now I setup TV on my client #1 and now I get different behavior.  The right click context menu is even different.   No cropping.    No option in the context window to to even select "Window->Crop Edges".    If I connect to the same backend library as before everything still looks good.

However on client #2 where I did not setup TV locally and only connect to the server I have the same experience that I posted above.   Loading the first TV station opens the channel and plays the video.   However the edges are cropped (reported by madvr).   The "right click" context menu is different (shows "Window->Crop  Edges" from the root of the menu).

Is there a different player or different set of settings that are used on the client when communicating with a back-end library?

(My tv tuners are HDHomerun CONNECT)

EDIT:  Looks like my client #1 is using local TV even though I am connected to my back-end server library.   So this appears to be an issue on a client that has no TV configured watching live tv from a backend server.

But now question #2 is how do I stop the client from using local TV when I am connected to a server library for TV?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on September 25, 2016, 03:06:51 pm
When a client has a local TV tuner, MC always uses it for watching TV live (but not for recording).  This conserves tuners so tuners on the server can be used for recording.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 25, 2016, 07:03:42 pm
Ok makes sense.

Any thoughts on clients cropping the edges?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: muzicman0 on September 25, 2016, 08:10:45 pm
Is there any possibility that you have display scaling turned on with that client PC (assuming Windows 10 - right click desktop, select Display Settings, and make sure that the 'Change the size of text, apps....etc' is set to 100%).
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 25, 2016, 08:13:39 pm
I do not.  Good thinking though.

If live tv is played locally from the client then nothing is cropped.  Only when playing back from the server.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: muzicman0 on September 25, 2016, 08:15:11 pm
gotcha.  that would certainly make my comment not applicable then.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on September 25, 2016, 08:48:30 pm
Playback from a client is likely treated as video streaming instead of strictly TV playback.  So the regular video  (i.e. non-TV video) crop edges setting may apply.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 25, 2016, 10:41:43 pm
Is there a way to disable it for streaming?
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: RoderickGI on September 26, 2016, 01:29:23 am
I have to uncheck "crop edges" from the Window context menu in the player.  It's checked there every time I start tv playback.

However on client #2 where I did not setup TV locally and only connect to the server I have the same experience that I posted above.   Loading the first TV station opens the channel and plays the video.   However the edges are cropped (reported by madvr).   The "right click" context menu is different (shows "Window->Crop  Edges" from the root of the menu).

I see what you mean. It is happening on my Client as well, but it hasn't concerned me as I upscale to a 2560x1600 resolution on that Client anyway. But still, the setting shouldn't be turning itself back on.

So to see the problem, start live TV on a Client that doesn't have a tuner installed and TV setup on it, connecting to a Server that has the tuner to be used.
Right click on the playing live TV, select the "Window" menu and note that "Crop Edges" is selected. Activating the madVR statistics display shows that the 720x576i video is being cropped to 686x552 with the line: "720x576 -> 686x552, 16:9". Turning off the "Crop Edges" changes that line to: "movie 720x576, 16:9", which is the actual broadcast resolution.

There is also a "right click>Window>Crop Black Bars" menu, in which "No Cropping" is correctly turned on, but also "Crop Side of Video to Fill Screen" is also turned on, which it shouldn't be.

I checked both the Client and Server settings for the following;
Under "Options>Television>Display" the setting "Crop edges to remove visual noise at the edge of some broadcasts" is turned off.

Under "Options>Video>Crop Edges" the two separate cropping settings for DVD and non-DVD video are both unchecked. The  "Amount of edge cropping: 2.00%" is set, but that doesn't matter if the two boxes above are unchecked.

Interestingly there is no "right click>Window" menu on the Server when playing the same live TV channel. But then the right click menu is quite different on the Server from the Client. There is also no cropping occurring according to the madVR statistics display.

Any thoughts on clients cropping the edges?

At a guess, madVR is handling streamed video quite differently on the Client compared to direct TV playback on the Server. I couldn't find any way to change that behaviour within madVR. I did note that for SD video, cropping did remove some artifacts from the edge of the video, which was an improvement. But for HD video the cropping wasn't necessary. Maybe madVR is trying to improve the image automatically when it detects streamed video?

Maybe the question is best posed over on the madVR support thread on the Doom9 forum, unless Yaobing can shed some light.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 26, 2016, 08:15:32 am
Thank you for confirming and writing up more details that describe the problem.

I doubt this has anything to do with madvr.  JRiver is determining the crop edges setting and adjusting the crop factor.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: Yaobing on September 26, 2016, 05:08:30 pm
Hopefully this will put the matter to rest:

Changed: When playing a jtv video (either recorded TV show, or live TV on a client), the television "Crop Edges" setting is applied, instead of always turning it on.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: dwalme on September 28, 2016, 11:26:39 am
Thank you.
Title: Re: Crop Edges option results in frames dropping in madVR
Post by: RoderickGI on September 30, 2016, 07:01:35 pm
The fix is in and working for MC22.0.32 and above. Look for it in a future public release.