FSE (Full Screen Exclusive) Mode Broke?

[gplasky]

You're on.

I understand what you're saying and that's part of my point. Agreed an mpeg2 decoder is required. But you'll have to make sure it works with every decoder. I'm just curious to see what you come up with because I know apps like TheaterTek and Zoom Player have had their own issues getting FSE to work for everyone in every instance. And those aren't java-based.

Good Luck.

Gerry

[salsbst]

and while I might use VMR9 just to pick the one that seems to have the most issues with sage,

I thought FSE was only available in VMR9, and that if you tried to use it in other modes, SageTV just ignored the setting.

Am I wrong?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by salsbst

I thought FSE was only available in VMR9, and that if you tried to use it in other modes, SageTV just ignored the setting.

Am I wrong?

I almost said the same thing. I think you are _supposed_ to set it to use VMR9 for FSE, but I am no longer sure that it is a requirement. I'm not entirely sure that overlay can't be used, but if someone forgot to change their renderer, they should make sure to try VMR9 with FSE.

- Andy

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by Kanati

How many games do you know that give you that warning?

Never programmed a game in my life, but I'd think that programming a game to be stable during video playback would be a lot easier simply because there are a finite number of images it would have to display.

I remember back in the 486/33 days, I had a few ATI Windows drivers that would lock up Windows based on what text was displayed in a wordprocessor. ATI wouldn't have had to revise their drivers if they just said: "This driver will be stable with the 1,001 word processing documents we've provided. You can open one or more of these, but you cannot modify any of them. Use of non-approved wordprocessing documents may cause system instability"

[gplasky]

Technically speaking:

The IDDrawExclModeVideo interface is implemented by the Overlay Mixer Filter. The interface enables video playback while in Microsoft® DirectDraw® exclusive full-screen mode. Game applications can use DirectDraw in exclusive full-screen mode and continue playing video. For example, the video can be in the background and graphics can be used on top of it. The application passes in a DirectDraw object and primary surface, and these are passed to the Overlay Mixer filter in the filter graph.

The DVD graph builder object uses IDDrawExclModeVideo to play DVD content while in DirectDraw exclusive full-screen mode. This interface can also be used alone to play MPEG-1 or AVI videos in games.

Some advatages:
In scenarios involving either a video port or multiple video input streams, prior to the VMR the Overlay Mixer filter was used for rendering. This filter only uses the hardware overlay on the graphics card, and so is generally limited to the one overlay surface provided by most cards. The Overlay Mixer performs destination color keying, but it is not capable of alpha blending. Because it does not have a window manager, it must use a second filter, the Video Renderer, for window management. The VMR is capable of true alpha blending, and can create multiple overlays in software in addition to the hardware overlays.

And more advantages:
The VMR is more robust than the earlier renderers, in part because it only uses DirectDraw 7 (or Direct3D 9 if you are using the VMR-9) interfaces, as opposed to the old renderers which used a mixture of interfaces from older and newer versions of DirectDraw. The VMR also employs a new image presentation mechanism which is designed for current and future generations of adapters, which have support for Direct3D, increased VRAM and video memory bandwidth, and hardware acceleration features. With the VMR, the focus is on front-end processing, and reduced dependence on video ports and overlays. But even with all its new functionality, the VMR is designed for maximum compatibility with existing applications.

The VMR is also extensible. Applications can provide their own sub-components to perform custom video effects and/or take control of the allocation and rendering process.

Just in case you wanted to know. And see a little deeper why it is so difficult to get it to work with everything. Overlay is old technology and is not being further developed as far as Microsoft is concerned. Everything is being developed with an eye towards VMR9 and whatever Vista brings.

Gerry

[blade]

I guess it's easy to blame Sage when FSE doesn't work, but I would be suprised if it's usually Sage's fault.

For example when I first tried to use FSE I had DX9.0c installed with the "fixed" 9.0c.dll and FSE wouldn't work at all. I went back to the "broken" version and FSE would work for about 2 seconds before the screen went black. Next I tried a different audio decoder and magically FSE started working; however, when switching from windowed to fullscreen I'd get a playback exception error everytime and would have to reboot before Sage would playback videos again. I recently installed the latest nvidia driver and decoder and now I can switch from windowed to fullscreen with no problems at all.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but when I have a problem and upgrade other software on my machine and the problem goes away I tend to assume the other software must not have followed the "standard" in some way and likely caused the problem.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by blade

I guess it's easy to blame Sage when FSE doesn't work, but I would be suprised if it's usually Sage's fault.
. . .

Maybe I'm mistaken, but when I have a problem and upgrade other software on my machine and the problem goes away I tend to assume the other software must not have followed the "standard" in some way and likely caused the problem.

Blade, I had similar experiences. It's actually possible that it's both. That Sage causes some problems, but that some systems simply aren't going to work with FSE no matter what Sage does.

I haven't tried FSE in the final release yet, but I suspect my problems were strictly Sage issues since the issues would go away (until I exited and then restarted Sage) if I'd go into setup and change codecs to overlay and then back to VMR9.