Windows 7 + Aero + BSplayer = Stuttering headache
 

Hello
I have not been writing much on these forums. I have now encountered a problem that I am unable to solve on my own, and I thought I would post here to see if anyone here have a good idea on how to solve it.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on a Q6600 2.4GHZ cpu, GeForce 8800GTX, and P45 chipset motherboard, using a raid 0 setup with 2 x 250GB harddrives. In short, more than enough to play video even in HD resolutions.

If I have Aero enabled and use the EVR render (which does not turn of aero) I get video stuttering. Audio plays fine. But video is not smooth at all. If I disable aero and keep the EVR renderer, the playback is smooth.

Playback is smooth with Aero on if I use windows media player that comes with windows 7 instead too. But I much rather prefer using bsplayer.

Any suggestions? I would like to not have to switch off aero every time I play a video since I do work at the same time in a multi monitor environment, and I prefer the aero look compared to the windows 7 basic interface.

I solved this problem. I dont know why it does not occur with Windows Media Player. But turning off "use Inverse Telecine" in the nvidia control panel removed the stuttering.

I thought this problem was solved, but all that disabling "use inverse telecine" did was to make it slightly better. I still have problems, especially with files that has a 23.976 framerate. Any suggestions?

Random suggestion: use the default windows 7 drivers for the geforce instead of those from the nvidia website, quite often people seem to have problems with drivers downloaded from the manufacturer as opposed to the default windows 7 drivers.

Worth a try.

Thank you for the suggestion, but that is not really an option for me. The drivers that comes with the fresh install of windows 7, as well as the drivers from windows update are far from optimal performance wise. One of the first things I tried was to do a fresh install of windows, install only BSPlayer, allow it to install the codecs it want to download locally, and then play videos that way. The stuttering was unbelievable. Installing the nvidia drivers actually helped quite a lot, but did not completely solve the problem.

It is most definetly a timing issue. If I hook up my old CRT display that is capable of doing 72Hz (23.976x3=71), the telecine gets a better 1:3 ratio instead of the 3:2:2 that is used when running at 60Hz (which is what my TFT displays use).

The weird thing is that it happens _only_ with BSPlayer. So I am beginning to suspect it has something to do with how BSPlayer uses EVR for Windows 7.

Same rig with Windows Vista or Windows XP, and there is no problem. On Vista I use EVR and have no problem. Which is strange, since it is the same display drivers, same file, same codecs, same BSPlayer, and a fresh install of Windows Vista. On Windows XP it uses overlay and as such there is no problem at all. Cant use EVR on XP.

Disabling Aero and using overlay drops the frequency of the stuttering to about 1/3 on Windows 7. Still there is no way to cure it.

I have even tried to eliminate codecs as part of the equation and used nvidia purevideo to decode the video. Which leaves only one factor remaining; the combination of BSPlayer and Windows 7.

Windows media player + purevideo to decode on a fresh install of windows 7, is as smooth as ever when playing back the video.
I just cant stand that media player since it lacks so many features I have become accustomed to from using BSplayer (multiple instances, skipping back and forth, remembering last played position etc.).

If only BSPlayer could do native framerate interpolation to double or three times the frame rate, we would have silksmooth playback. The stuttering only occurs in pan and scan scenes with 23.976 framerate. Which is why I am fairly certain at this point that it is a timing issue that comes from how BSPlayer uses EVR (which of course brings it back to display drivers in the end to render it all).

Using Reclock solves the stuttering. But then I can only playback one video with audio (multiple instances not supported) at the same time. And I need to be able to play multiple clips at once when I work with video, in order to do comparisons.

Any further suggestions? I have been trying so many solutions that I may have overlooked something obvious. They are very much appreciated.

If your stuttering is anything like mine, heres the cure:

under subtitles in preferences: disable drawing subtitles under video in EVR.

Thats it. Subtitles will no longer work under the video, but the stuttering is gone. It has been driving me mad. I accidentally noticed that there was no stuttering in mkv h264 files that had no subtitles. I played with subtitle options and viola.

Btw i too have q6600 with p45 chipset and nvidia gpu- gtx 460. I updated the drivers, codecs, bsplayer itself.. nothing helped- until I accidentally figured it out.

The other workarround I found is to use interlanal direct draw surface instead of EVR for video rendering. It works fine 99.9% of the time. It crashes BS player on exit. I found it a good tradeoff, but now, most times I really dont need subitles to render under the picture as most shows are 16:9. I also found out that in movies with higher aspects, subtitles/bsplayer work fine anyway, so I might as well tick "show subtitles under EVR" when watching these.

The bizare thing in all of this is, that for a couple of days bsplayer worked fine- no stuttering even with EVR and subtitles being drawn where they should be- under the video. All of a suddent it stopped working and... here we are.

I hope this saves somene the trouble of figuring it out. I do wish bsplayer woud fix it. It seams like one problem after another with bs player. If other players werent so lame, Id ditch bslpayer long time ago..

I know this might be a bit of a necro, but it was one of the first results in google and i can improve it for anyone that will search for this.

I was also having huge evr overlay stutter. I switched to madVR, but while it was fine for 720p, anything else it would give random errors while changing volume or such.

Oddly, the solution i found for fixing the EVR stutter was simple and stupid, right click, options, Always on top overlay mode. Make sure you check it, since weirdly, it only registers sometimes. When it does, you'll have stutter-free video, but oddly again, needs to be reset everytime.

This does have a weird downside, when you fullscreen, you'll click-through the video, and can only get it back via keyboard commands/options.

I don't know how or why this works, but it does.

Stats below for the devs if they're still checking this:

Win7 pro 32bit, v6.1 build 7601 sp1
Bsplayer 2.63 1071 (had this issue for a long while before this version)
GF660TI
i3700k