BIGBOX High resolution videos wrong colours and sound noice.
Issue #396
resolved
When you are using BIGBOX in a low resolution arcade, like 1024x768 or 800x600 and the video downloaded from emumovies is high resolution (for example 3DO videos) the videos show wrong colours or glitches on screen, even bad sound for a few seconds...then they fix themselves again, if you change a game it will do the same AGAIN...and AGAIN...and again.
You can't see anything... the videos are all distorted and corrupted...when I play all these videos on windows media player or mpc they look fine, no problem, video is perfect and sound is perfect.
This is a really killer bug... it is making me regret the buy, this...no support for ledblinky, the amount of problems i had to import a filtered list of mame roms...
Comments (21)
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reporter
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reporter
This happens with almost all 3DO videos, they are mostly high resolution...with low resolution videos from atari 5200 or atari 7800 this does not happen.
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repo owner
Thank you Martin, this is pretty odd. What do you mean by high resolution? 480p or 720p or what? It is possible that this has to do with certain codecs that might be installed on your system, but if they play fine in Windows Media Player then that doesn't fully make sense. What happens if you try to play them in Windows Media Player after you shrink the window down to a small size?
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repo owner
This also could have to do with video drivers, so check to make sure your video drivers are up to date. What are you using for a video card? What version of Windows are you running?
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reporter
The videos look fine on the player, at any size, My arcade machine is:
Core 2 Duo e6700 3GB Ram 2 WD 3TB harddrives Video Nvidia 7800 GT Windows 7 64Bits Last drivers for video and everything. Last Directx I installed Klite Mega codec pack to see if it fixes the problem, but no, it looks better but the problem is still there, only on BIGBOX.
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reporter
I just tried to reproduce all videos on windows media player at 50% scale (almost the same as bigbox) , nothing happens... i change from video to video very quickly and nothing bad happens, all videos look just perfect.
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reporter
high resolution videos from emumovies are 640x480. but forget about that, it happens with any kind of video
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repo owner
Sure. Just to share where I'm coming from, this must be a glitch with WPF (the underlying Microsoft visual technology that Big Box uses) and its MediaElement control, which is what is playing the videos. Unfortunately, the only thing I could do to fix it would be to rip it out and come up with a completely different solution for the videos. Sigh.
However, I have found a few links that might be relevant:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/140483-45-windows-media-player-wrong-color http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1313907/wpf-video-colors-in-mediaelement-different-from-windows-media-player
I didn't do an extensive search yet, but the above seem to be referring to hardware acceleration and the Nvidia control panel settings. It might be a long shot, but it's probably worth a bit of tinkering to see if it helps. I can also try to reproduce it myself on my end to see if it's machine-specific. At this point I expect that it is, because no one else has reported this issue.
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reporter
I found this on microsoft website
Symptoms On some computers running Windows 8, when you play specific video files in Windows Media Player, or in the Xbox Video app, you may notice some visible distortion (video artifacts) during the first few moments of playback. For example, there may be colored macroblocking artifacts in the bottom portion of the video frame.
After a few seconds, the distortion goes away, and the video plays normally. Cause Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
This problem occurs because of a bug in the Windows video decoder when it starts playback and decodes the first video frame. It is most likely to occur when playing videos which are encoded using a very high bitrate. Due to implementation differences between different graphics drivers, the problem may not occur on all computers.
Same happens on windows 7.
Resolution To work around this issue, leave the video clip open in the application and restart playback of the video. On subsequent plays, the distortion will not be visible.
Yeah... fuck you microsoft...that is not a solution, this happens to me alto in another computer, but only in facebook, i tried bigbox on the other computer and it works just fine...
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repo owner
Interesting, that could be related. That doesn't really help us solve the problem though, and it's still curious why it would work in WMP but not in Big Box which uses the same tech (which makes me think it might be related to hardware acceleration).
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reporter
Does the hardware acceleration go away if i uninstall the video drivers and install generic windows drivers? or is it a problem with the codec?
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repo owner
Try this:
"If you have an NVidia card, goto the NVidia control panel. Click on "Video" in the options tree. Select the monitor and click the "With NVidia Settings" radio button. In the advanced tab, select "Dynamic Range 0-255"."
And this:
"I have experienced this problem, I found that if you go into display properties and then settings and then the troubleshooting tab. Turn the hardware accelaration down. Once you have it fixed, then you can turn the hardware accelaration up on notch at a time. I hope this helps!"
I'd probably try the second one first.
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reporter
First option did nothing, i'm trying with the second, but the option is greyed out, i'm uninstalling nvidia drivers now.... just a sec
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reporter
Ok, after uninstalling nvidia last drivers windows booted up and installed nvidia default drivers that come with windows 7, bigbox is showing all the videos right, but windows is asking me to reboot. Let's see if windows drivers mess up everything again...but at least we have found what the problem is...something about last version of nvidia drivers.
the bad thing is....bigbox now goes horrible slow.... the transitions, animations, everything goes slow
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reporter
Ok, after booting up, windows installed correctly windows 7 default nvidia 7800 gt drivers (the ones that come with windows -wdm microsoft blablabla version) , big box goes smooth again, everything works, all videos look amazing and everything is fixed...
Can we set on fire nvidia's building now?
Do i even try to install nvidia's last drivers AGAIN to see if something goes diferent?
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reporter
Ok, after playing all over bigbox trying to see if everything works I encountered that the bug is still happening but now is a lot less visible, and it happens only in a few videos...like...in 1 video every 15
So this is still a bug. I took a picture of the most noticeable one i encountered, like before, the wrong colours go away after a few seconds.
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reporter
Yeah... installled nvidia last drivers again to see if this is indeed the problem....yes it is...all videos are messed up again...
So I deleted the drivers again and I'm now using microsoft wdm drivers for nvidia 7800 gt. Everything works fine, just minor glitches on some videos, but they are 90% better than before.
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reporter
I found another problem with this bug, to avoid the wrong colours on the videos just install windows wdm drivers, the only problem at doing that...retroarch will crash, retroarch doesn't like old drivers or default windows drivers.
I'm trying to update the drivers using old Asus drivers (the geforce is from asus), i'll check if the bug is still there using an old version of asus drivers for the nvidia card.
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repo owner
I have noticed this issue too on one of my monitors on one of my computers. It's a horrible bug because it only happens with certain drivers and video cards, and apparently even only on certain monitor inputs (I have two identical Asus monitors, and the issue happens on the one that uses HDMI but does not happen on the one that uses DVI). Sigh.
Fixing it is literally going to require ripping out the Microsoft Windows video playback and replacing it with a different solution entirely. Unfortunately I do think this needs to happen as this isn't the only issue we've run into. I'm marking this as major because it does need to happen but it will be a significant job so I can't get to it right away.
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repo owner
- marked as major
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repo owner
- changed status to resolved
We've added VLC as an option to use as the video playback engine. So if the Windows Media Player engine is giving people trouble, they can just use the VLC one.
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There you go... If i reproduce the same video on any player outside bigbox it works perfect. The sound is also fucked up... I just don't know what to do...is unfair... i'll give hypershit a try I guess..