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[wer]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it in a search...

It seems that in theater view, the progress bar (the position indicator) in "Playing Now" frequently doesn't update.  Playback continues perfectly of course, it's just a problem with the visual indicator updating.

It will get stalled at the start of a song, or stop moving in the middle of a song. This never happens with the standard view progress bar, only in theater view.

Using the remote to move around between selecting the title/volume/position will often nudge it into moving again, but obviously this is not the proper behavior.

It's been doing this for quite a while and versions now.  (currently on MC 16.0.128, windows7 64bit)

Can this be fixed?  

Thanks very much!

[wer]

Even with the priority on the Media Center process set to HIGH, the timer jumped from 4:22 to 5:08 to 5:52.  Sometimes it will hang for shorter periods of time, just a few seconds, like 0:08 -> 0:21 -> 0:51

(I have no other applications running... It's a dedicated HTPC running Win7x64)

Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Thank you!

[Matt]

Could you test 16.0.145 (just posted)?

I'm wondering if this change might help:
Changed: Improved performance of hardware accelerated drawing engine used by Theater View, image playback, etc. with devices that could stall when testing for device lost states.

Thanks.

[Matt]

I know you're just testing, but I wouldn't change the process priority as a permanent measure.  Doing so can cause low priority threads to start stealing cycles from high priority threads.  In effect, it'll do the opposite of what you might expect.

[wer]

Thanks, Matt.

I just updated to 145, and unfortunately that didn't fix it...

The first track I played, the position indicator in Theater View Playing Now performed perfectly.  However, when that track concluded and MC automatically advanced to the next track, the position indicator jumped as follows:
0:0, 0:17, 0:28, 0:31, 1:03, etc...

Audio playback was perfect of course, this is only an interface problem.

[Matt]

When it's stuck, can you navigate up and down smoothly, or does that get choppy as well?

What if you push Pause/Break on the keyboard.  It should show your framerate information.  What does it look like when stalling?

Thanks.

[FastKayak]

In case this helps.....

My progress dot has been AWOL for many builds (I don't know exactly when it went away as I don't watch it often)  but returned somewhere in the 141 or 145 builds.

FastKayak / Larry

[wer]

An interesting result from the test, Matt...

First off, the GUI is always very responsive to button presses.  Never any issues there, it's always perfect. The outline box always moves instantly.  Sometimes, but not always, arrowing onto and away from the progress bar seems to nudge it into movement.  It seems to sometimes, but it may be coincidental, because sometimes it has no effect.

When the progress bar is updating normally, the framerate changes rapidly so I can't give you an exact figure, but it's always high, 60fps or higher, with a "ms per draw" of apx 5.4

When the progress bar hangs, the fps stays high and continues changing rapidly in the 60fps and above range; there is no discernable effect during the hang on FPS.

HOWEVER, when the progress bar gets into this hanging state, the "ms per draw" statistic gets locked on 16.7.   Note that this is 3 times longer than the normal statistic of 5.x

Does that give you a clue?   Thanks for looking into this.

(I'm glad to also see someone else has this problem, so I know I'm not cursed.)

[Matt]

Good detective work.

For now, you might just switch to a goal frame rate of 30fps in Options > Theater View > Advanced.

For some reason the render loop is swamping the main thread so that its timers don't run.  What type of video card are you using, and do you have the latest drivers installed?  If I could reproduce this, we might be able to make Theater View work more nicely in these cases.

[wer]

Another very interesting result...

When set to a target of 30fps, the problem does not seem to occur, although obviously animations and the UI are not as smooth.  But what was more surprising was that the time "ms per draw" dropped from 5 to 0.5.  So a frame draw was taking one tenth the time to return.

That seemed noteworthy, so I did some more testing, and recorded the following:
FPS Target      Actual FPS    ms/draw     Problem occurs?
---------------------------------------------------------
60                  66+          5             Yes
58                  64           5             Yes
57                 ~60          0.4            No
50                  54          0.4            No
30                  34          0.5            No

Timings that have a low (less than 1ms) draw time do not seem to exhibit the hanging, and timings that have the high (5ms) draw time DO seem to be succeptible.  (Remember draw time goes to 16ms when the hang actually occurs.  Times in the above table are nominal draw times.)  If the actual framerate rises significantly above 60, that's when the draw time increases by a factor of 10.  This happens when setting the target to 58fps.

The actual refresh rate on the display and driver is set to 60Hz.  Changing the drivers settings to either force VSYNCH or allow arbitrary framerates does not seem to affect whether the problem will occur.

Video card is a Radeon 5570.  Packaging version 8.812-110104a-111988C.  Driver version 8.01.01.1114.    Running on a Core i5-2500k quad-core @ 3.3GHz, 4GB RAM, Win7x64 HomePrem.  There is no significant load on the system when running MC16 (basically 0% CPU).

For the time being, I will leave my target framerate set to 54.  This gives me smooth animations and a responsive interface, and seems to prevent the hanging in my limited testing so far.  If that turns out not to be the case I'll let you know.

I think the nominal draw time jumping from 0.4ms to 5ms even when not in a "hanging" state is significant.

Thanks very much for pointing out the idea to change the framerate!  Hopefully it will be an effective bandaid on the problem.

I don't suppose while you're in there, you could add an option to display the numerical time in the progress bar all the time without having to arrow down to select it?     It would be nice to be able to have a bit more of a sense of where we are in the song...

Thank you!