Normally I would mess around with the settings in a situation like this but I dont have the time right now to dig into it, so Im hoping others have a quick fix
For years I used Gom Player and didnt really have any issues, but long story short they started throwing ads in their product and am no longer using it as a result.
I have since switched to PotPlayer which is very similar in terms of UI and features to GOM. I have tried VLC player but just could never fall in love with it for one reason or another.
The issue is with playback on MKV files and its a bit hard to describe. There is no audio/video stutter per se, but I cant help but feel there is a small noticeable 'slow down' of the video only that takes place for a few seconds then returns to normal.
I do notice it to the extent that It does kind of break the movie watching experience.
I have installed CoreAVC but I dont think I pointed the player to use that codec for MKV files, I may have to dig in the settings.
Yeah, I can vouch for MPC-HC. Been using it for years. I could whip up a tutorial but there's quite a few out there already, just look at whatever is the latest.
It comes with LAV Filters (audio, video, splitter source) which handles the decoding stuff. Offers plenty of settings for you to fiddle with if you so wish. You can access them by opening MPC-HC, play some video (pause if you wish), right click > Filters > LAV audio or video. https://mpc-hc.org/ It will just work out of the box.
But, while you're at it, you might as well grab madVR which is an alternate video renderer. Download, unzip, run install.bat. Open MPC-HC, O for options, verify madVR is selected in drop down menu found in Playback > Output > DirectShow Video. Apply. madVR settings can be accessed by opening MPC-HC, play some video (pause if you wish), right click > Filters > madVR > Edit Settings.
If you go with madVR as well, you might wanna see some guide about it which explains all the things you can do with it.
Nice features and if your GPU can handle it, ridiculous upscaling algorithms available and whatnot.
One of the features I love is the automagic refresh rate switching depending on the content you're watching. Another one if your TV can't handle all the refresh rates is smooth motion. It basically does some sort of frame rate conversion to eliminate any motion judder resulted from fps/Hz not being 1:1 (of course it won't eliminate the hideous panning shots, even 1:1 doesn't...)
Of course with that GT 730 you're not going to be using any high quality custom pixel shader code scaling algorithms, primarily just the default DXVA2 GPU logic and bilinear scaling which is done using gpu texture units.
One trick up your sleeve would be to put your i5-2400 iGPU to good use. Specifically video decoding! To free up some resources from the GT 730.
This can be done even if you don't actively "use" the iGPU or MB video outs, you only need to have the multimonitor option in BIOS enabled (not P67) and create a dummy display in Windows screen resolution settings. After that just go to configure LAV Filters to utilize Intel QuickSync and voilá, your iGPU does decoding and dGPU handles rendering and displaying.
This is exactly what I've done. I have a GTX 670 so it doesn't quite need help, decoding regular 1080p stuff isn't that taxing.. But at least I can say there's some use for the iGPU in my 3770K!
I actually downloaded MadVR and it seems pretty solid running it with PotPlayer. I do notice however it does make the monitor flicker when it switches from windowed mode to Fullscreen, from what Ive read its the render using the video card to switch back and forth between the render and the OS (Or something to that effect). Is there a way to not make it flicker?
For example I have one monitor that is just for movies, so when I want to fast forward in the movie it goes from full screen to windowed to display the progress bar of the movie so you can jump and it flickers at this point. Just curious if there is a way to force it to not flicker as I switch in between. (To note I have 3 monitors in total)
Have you enabled fullscreen exclusive mode in madvr? Have a look through the settings, I can't remember what they're called but there should be some options in there which might help.
Yeah, it's the fullscreen exclusive mode doing that. It's supposed to do that. Basically grabs the output for itself. If you disable it there could be some smoothness issues. But test it yourself. Can be found under rendering > general settings.
allows madVR to use “fullscreen exclusive mode” for video rendering. This can potentially give you some big performance improvements, and allows for several frames to be sent to the video card in advance, which can help eliminate random stuttering during playback. It will also prevent things like notifications from other applications being displayed on the screen at the same time, and similar to the Windowed Overlay mode, it stops “Print Screen” from working. The main downside to Fullscreen Exclusive mode is that when switching in/out of FSE mode, the screen will flash black for a second. (similar to changing refresh rates) Media Center's mouse-based interface is rendered in such a way that it would not be visible in FSE mode, so madVR gets kicked out of FSE mode any time you use it, and you get that black flash on the screen. I personally find this distracting, and as such, have disabled FSE mode, because I don't need the additional performance for smooth playback on my computer. (I have an Nvidia GTX 570) The "10ft interface" is unaffected, and renders correctly inside FSE mode.
Here's a guide/wiki https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/MadVR_Expert_Guide http://wiki.mikejung.biz/MadVR < some recommended settings you might wanna take a look at P.S. ctrl + J shows up madVR's own OSD during video playback (at least on MPC-HC, dunno about PotPlayer) where you can see various things. Stats for nerds basically. Interesting tid bits is the rendering time (basically performance) and whether you've had dropped/repeated frames and so on. (Edit: You want to have rendering time lower than movie frame interval.)
So I did turn off Exclusive Windows Mode but I also enabled 'Enable Smooth motion frame rate conversion' as this seemed to be exactly what my issue was without me being able to phrase it that way. I set it to 'Only if there would be motion judder without it"
I guess I will have to test a few vids to see if this helps.
So Ive tested a few different setups and it seems leaving the exclusive mode enabled offers the best performance but with the price tag of the flickering screen. I often switch to different parts of movies by bringing up the 'progress bar' (if you want to call it) but doing so switches it to windowed mode followed by the flickering. Im wondering if there is a way to keep the movie in exclusive mode and bring up the progress bar of the movie without it flickering. I dont think this is possible but maybe there is some compromise I can make with the settings.
Edit- Navigation Pane is the word I was looking for not progress bar
Okay these are my madvr settings, they're under the rendering menu.
If that doesn't work then it may be a problem with your player. I'd suggest using MPC-HC instead. It has the LAV filters built in which are in my opinion the best codecs you can use. They support CUDA, DXVA and intel quicksync which will improve your playback performance. If that doesn't solve your playback issues you can also have a look at reclock, it's an audio renderer which adjusts the frame timing to match the refresh rate and can fix choppy blackback issues.
I think the settings which you need to stop your flickering issue are on the general menu: 'enable windowed overlay' and on the exclusive mode menu: 'show seek bar' and disable 'delay switch to exclusive mode by 3 seconds'.
So I matched your settings De and oddly it made all 3 screens flicker not just the one. So I scaled a few settings back and Im currently running this and the flicker doesnt last as long...so some progress
Some where in the devices menu there's an option to change the screen resolution to match the video, try disabling that. The flickering must be because of a resolution or refresh rate change when going from your desktop resolution to whatever resolution the player chooses when you go in to fullscreen mode.
Damn I thought that one was a winner, it makes sense, so I tried diabeling the first and second options (at separate times) and then tried for all 3 monitors with no luck
Ill just wait to see if an update from potplayer makes a difference. Amazing how much this madVR makes a difference, the smooth playback is incredible, no motion stutter, if the video didnt flicker I would be in love.
Yeah, it's the player. Just clicking on the seek bar shouldn't drop it from exclusive to windowed. But, on the other hand, I use MPC-HC and I do not have any problem with that. Personally I'd suggest at least trying MPC-HC for a while. Of course you could look take a look at MPC-BE (Black Edition apparently) if MPC-HC (Home Cinema) GUI doesn't tickle your fancy.
Also fyi, those three tick boxes in the display modes submenu do nothing unless you're actually utilizing madvr's automagic resolution/refresh rate thingymagick. In other words actually have for example 1080p23,1080p24 and so on listed in the text field. You might wish to try that if your monitor supports any relevant refresh rates besides 60Hz and depending on what kind of content you have? If you do that, you wouldn't have to use smooth motion which is rather heavy computation wise.
For example my TV can handle pretty much all of the necessary refresh rates, which is to be expected, it's a TV. 1080p23, 1080p24, 1080p50, 1080p60 > 23.976fps, 24fps, 25fps/50fps, 30fps/60fps
But if your monitor is a regular computer monitor, it supporting say 23.976Hz is quite unlikely and even more unlikely to be able to actually have it running at 23.976Hz.. Although, you can always try "overclocking" the monitor since if you have 23.976fps video the refresh rate can be either 1:1 with the frame rate or a multiple of the frame rate. My cheapo BenQ monitor is 60Hz but can work at up to 75Hz and also supported 50Hz out of the box. That pretty much gave me ALL the required refresh rates for the common frame rates.
23.976fps > 71.928Hz or 47.952Hz (some effort required, they're fiddly refresh rates, three decimals....) 24fps > 48Hz or 72Hz (if you can, "downclock" from 50Hz to 48Hz, otherwise use 72Hz) 25fps > 50Hz or 75Hz 30fps > 60hz
If you're interested in this, look up Custom Resolution Utility, you'll find guides with that. Of course you can also use nvidia control panel and it's customize resolution utility.
The other thing I read was using a 32 bit version of potplayer which ill try when I get home. I also came across SVP (Smooth Video Project) and was thinking if I cant get madVR to work I will switch the render to Haali Media Splitter as this is the next best one I have and try using it in combo with SVP.
I use SVP with madvr and the lav splitter built in to mpc-hc. I don't think haali is a renderer but I could be wrong about that.
You should try the 32 bit version, a lot of stuff doesn't work on 64 bit players as everything (codecs, splitters, renderers, etc) need to be 64 bit as well and a lot aren't.
Sure you could use Haali but as far as I know, it's renderer doesn't even come close to madVR. But feel free to experiment and see what works best for you ;)
SVP is really, really cool and amazing for cartoons or anime.
It's what you have on your higher end TV or projector, frame interpolation which takes your xxfps video to yyHz monitor refresh rate. Basically taking frame A + B and figuring out what happens between them! Some might call it the soap opera effect. Except with SVP, there's no fixed function hardware doing it very efficiently. Instead your CPU/GPU are making it happen with a lot of power consumption and noise and if not enough horsepower, not that great looking.
Example of SVP with anime content. Be sure to tick 720p60/1080p60 if it's not automagic..
But you might not have a fun time with SVP if you're gonna try it out. Low end settings will more than likely work for you but you might not be pleased with the quality.
Like I said at the beginning. Cool for cartoons or anime but for movies or TV? Eeeh, it depends. The thing with cartoon/anime content is the sharp edges/lines. It's easy for the algorithms to determine the edges of the objects in motion to calculate the missing frames it's creating.
Movies or TV, not so much. Artifacts galore all along the edges unless you crank the settings up. And better quality and/or artifact detection/hiding costs horsepower. A LOT of horsepower. The GT 730 is good enough for SVP (SVP alone) and the i5-2400 is quite good but a quad core at 3.4Ghz it's not best of the bunch.
With my [email protected] + OC'd GTX 670* this is what Tron Legacy looked like. (ShadowPlay recording) If I recall correctly, this was with the best settings my PC could handle with madVR in there as well. Disclaimer though, this was almost two years ago so the algorithms more than likely have improved some what from then. Didn't bother redownloading/installing/configuring/capturing and possibly have it mess up my MPC-HC/madVR/xy-sub-filter installation in the process.
Tron Legacy SVP (side by side) demo. Be sure to tick 720p60/1080p60 if it's not automagic..
*roughly 4-9 times more processing power depending on whether your GT 730 is GF108 (DDR3, 128bit) or GK208 (GDDR5, 64bit) variant. Also the CPU can handle a tad more computations, Sandy Bridge > Ivy Bridge generational improvement was ~6% while Hyperthreading adds 20-40%, while the clock speed difference alone is 35%.
Edit: And it's uploaded now and finished processing 1080p60, 720p60 probably available a bit later.
