First of all, this problem also appeared in MC 20. If you prefer, I will test with MC 20 instead, and continue the discussion in the MC 20 subforum.
I am on a laptop that runs Windows 8.1. My Graphics Card is an AMD HD 6970M, and I am using Catalyst drivers of version 15.7.1. According to those drivers, my laptop's integrated display supports 60 Hz and 120 Hz progressive modes. I have set it to use 60 Hz.
For the record, I have reset my madVR settings to default, and then deleted the entire contents of my AppData/Roaming/J River/Media Center 21/Plugins folder. Even though MC used freshly downloaded versions at default settings, the problem remained. I have also verified that using Red October (Standard) playback mode is unaffected.
Let me also state that while I knew about this for some time, I could never reproduce it reliably. So before I led everyone on a wild goose chase, I decided to gather more data. Also, I rarely watch videos, and when I watch them, my laptop is usually connected to my TV and I watch them there. So not only could I rarely reproduce the issue, I also rarely had a chance to encounter the issue. Now, however, that I know about MC's logging ability, I hope that I can submit enough data to make a useful bug report. Also, a lot of these observations are recent.
Sometimes, when I open a video on my laptop's screen, madVR's debug OSD will display 0.000000 Hz (I didn't count the number of zeroes) as display frequency at the very beginning, on a black screen, and from then on the video window won't update any more. When resizing the video window, e.g. because I entered/left fullscreen mode, the debug OSD (and presumably the rest of the black screen, too) will simply scale to the new resolution without updating. In case of an Aspect Ratio mismatch, this is especially obvious because the debug OSD's font will not only grow larger/smaller on-screen, it will also be stretched either horizontally or vertically.
After a while of showing a black screen instead of the video, the UI will become unresponsive and Windows recognize the program as hanging with the details
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: AppHangB1
Application Name: Media Center 21.exe
Application Version: 21.0.3.0
Application Timestamp: 55d20dca
Hang Signature: 3448
Hang Type: 134217729
OS Version: 6.3.9600.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Hang Signature 1: 3448ad983085b787dc84305e486e7a69
Additional Hang Signature 2: 1001
Additional Hang Signature 3: 10019c3202f175aac389a617d64260d9
Additional Hang Signature 4: bea2
Additional Hang Signature 5: bea2af981274e89edad4aeafc0527bdd
Additional Hang Signature 6: df9e
Additional Hang Signature 7: df9ea1cccb84b8a52ab8436c3614a1f2and offer me to terminate the program (with or without error submission), or to wait for the program to react. If I choose to wait for the program to react, MC will recover eventually, presumably after the entire movie has finished "playing".
Similarly, at the beginning of the video playback, audio will play normally, and accompany the black screen, but after a while, the audio playback will also stop. I haven't verified this, but I suspect that the timing for the audio stop is identical to the timing of the UI unresponsiveness.
If, while the UI is still responsive, I click on the Stop button, then either the movie stops normally (if it was very shortly after starting movie "playback"), or the UI becomes unresponsive, as explained above. Today, I found out that if I change the audio track during that early phase of playback, the UI also becomes unresponsive.
Now for the interesting part:
Sometimes, the video playback will recover by itself and find the expected refresh rate of roughly 60 Hz by itself. In that case, madVR's OSD will show a huge amount of dropped frames. From then on, the video will play fluently.
Before I used MC, I used Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. I only encountered such a problem there when I tried setting my laptop screen to 120 Hz. To my bug report,
madshi responded that 120 Hz refresh rates are sometimes problematic in madVR. Once I switched back to 60 Hz, madVR worked again.
When I manage to make the playback window switch to my TV, it instantly recovers, including a huge amount of dropped frames and all. The same is true for when, in Windows, I make adjustments to the desktop arrangements that involve re-assigning displays (setting a display as the only screen, changing the primary display, unplugging the TV from the HDMI port, etc).
Curiously, the madVR configuration window shows 2 greyed-out (i.e. inactive, not connected) display devices (Dell U3011 and Dell U2410). I never had such a device connected to my laptop. My laptop's screen is detected as Epson SAMSUNG 173HT02-C01.
That leads me to believe that MC has problems correctly handling my laptop's display. However, it handles my TV fine, and it can also handle the laptop display once it is re-initialized.
Please tell me for which situations you'd like to have logs (I see too many possibly-relevant scenarios to just create logs for all of them at once) and I will provide them. Unless otherwise specified, I will also include madVR debug logs. Please also tell me if you need additional data.
Author
Topic: [Solved] madVR cannot detect refresh rate (Read 4054 times)