Massive stuttering and freezing during BB intro videos

[cammelspit]

Doing some testing and my BB has started hitching and freezing during the intro videos. I reverted to beta5 and it's still happening. One day it was fine and literally the next, bam all messed up. Take a look at this video and you will see what I mean.

I have tried deleting all plugins and playlists because that is just about the only thing I have changed at all since it was working fine. After this started happening I went and downloaded the latest drivers for my video card, there was one minor update but nothing changed. @Jason Carr You are my only hope!

 

EDIT: Sorry, but I forgot to mention, it also seems my startup time drastically increased out of nowhere. Right after the startup performance beta I could have BB loaded right as this startup video finished once...

Edited May 14, 2017 by cammelspit

[ea4492]

What did you Break now @cammelspit. LOL, i haven't experienced this.

[SentaiBrad]

Nothing else changed for your PC? The Intro Video playing will have little to do with Big Box. Sure, Jason made the ability for these to run, but this is all VLC for the most part.

[cammelspit]

Just now, ea4492 said:

What did you Break now @cammelspit. LOL, i haven't experienced this.

I know right? I have no idea. I even tried clearing my entire data folder aside from the platforms to no avail. Seems it started right after the plugins update and I didn't notice it till I went to use BB yesterday. Literally, nothing else has changed AFAIK.

[cammelspit]

Just now, SentaiBrad said:

Nothing else changed for your PC? The Intro Video playing will have little to do with Big Box. Sure, Jason made the ability for these to run, but this is all VLC for the most part.

 

Nope. I haven't even so much as downloaded any more steam games, roms, updated any emulators... Nothing.  I watched youtube videos and played some castle crashers with my son but that is absolutely everything, other than the beta has been incremented.

[cammelspit]

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

App:     Big Box
Version: 7.10-beta-6
Type:    System.NullReferenceException
Site:    Void (Int32)
Source:  Unbroken.LaunchBox

   at (Int32 )
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Root.SafeTerminate(Int32 exitCode)
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App..ctor()
   at ()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App.Main()

Recent Log:

   10:26:45 PM Exception

Tried a 100% fresh install on another drive and BB won't even open. Ironically, the old install does open. I guess I broked it again.

[cammelspit]

Update

In safe mode, I used DDU to clean out my video drivers and I then reinstalled the latest ones right off AMDs website, no change.

[Jason Carr]

Ah, I'm sure this is happening because of our changes in the 7.10 betas to use ALL of your system resources to speed up the startup. Instead of just using one or two cores, we use as much as possible now. So it makes sense that your system is crying when trying to play the startup video. I guess we could use one less core/thread on startup. It is odd that it seems to be only happening to @cammelspit though.

[cammelspit]

That is interesting. I am toying around with the idea of maybe wiping my machine and starting fresh. I haven't done anything over what I mentioned above but I would never entirely rule out Windows shenanigans. I also wouldn't want you do use fewer cores if this is something that only I am experiencing. I kept an eye on system explorer and it is tipping right up to a max of nearly 100% CPU usage ONE time and it is really for the smallest split second. Mostly, it's sitting at around 20% and spiking up to about 76%. My CPU is overclocked to 4.5Ghz so it's not underpowered or anything but it is an i5 and not an i7 so it has no hyperthreaded cores.  I went and set BB to be below normal priority and it worked. Setting VLC to high priority and BB to normal, however, did not work. So, for me, if I could cap BB to use only 3 cores of the 4 I have that should work, for me at least because it only spikes to 100% for a tiny fraction of a second and is mostly in the 30%-60% range most of the loading process. I wonder, is there a way to set BB to below normal priority during startup and kick it back up after it's started? I dunno what the permanent fix here is because everyone has a different machine with different needs, cores and clock speeds.

Blah....

[JuanHeSi]

Well I dont know if its related, but since a win 10 update this weekend (sorry the little devil just wont stop updating without my approval ) big box (running launchbox 7.9) starts horrible slow and background video just wont play like it´s dead but alt tabbing solves the problem... I did not change anything at all (I even tried to stop antivirus but is just the same).

By the way last week when everything was all right I was using a very long video for start up (James Baker´s arcade classics intro) due to my loading time (like 20 seconds or so), but when Big Box ended loading it was all a smooth experience.

I´m very happy with launch box / big Box, and I really think it´s Windows fault  right now  I had to stop using startup videos... but I´m still happy with the experience. You guys are awesome!

PD: Running windows 10 Pro 64 bits, full Mame, Snes, Nes, Genesis Romset and the Beautiful City Hunter Theme on Launchbox 7.9

[LogicalEgo]

9 hours ago, JuanHeSi said:

Well I dont know if its related, but since a win 10 update this weekend (sorry the little devil just wont stop updating without my approval ) big box (running launchbox 7.9) starts horrible slow and background video just wont play like it´s dead but alt tabbing solves the problem... I did not change anything at all (I even tried to stop antivirus but is just the same).

By the way last week when everything was all right I was using a very long video for start up (James Baker´s arcade classics intro) due to my loading time (like 20 seconds or so), but when Big Box ended loading it was all a smooth experience.

I´m very happy with launch box / big Box, and I really think it´s Windows fault  right now  I had to stop using startup videos... but I´m still happy with the experience. You guys are awesome!

PD: Running windows 10 Pro 64 bits, full Mame, Snes, Nes, Genesis Romset and the Beautiful City Hunter Theme on Launchbox 7.9

Are you using Windows Media Player or VLC as your playback engine?

[JuanHeSi]

6 minutes ago, keltoigael said:

Are you using Windows Media Player or VLC as your playback engine?

Hi there, Im using vlc for launchbox engine since the install. I will try turning game mode off (I think that came by default on with the creators update this weekend) later tonight and get back to this thread to share if there are any better results 

[spektor56]

15 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Ah, I'm sure this is happening because of our changes in the 7.10 betas to use ALL of your system resources to speed up the startup. Instead of just using one or two cores, we use as much as possible now. So it makes sense that your system is crying when trying to play the startup video. I guess we could use one less core/thread on startup. It is odd that it seems to be only happening to @cammelspit though.

This is it, he is using all the threads on your PC which is starving the rest of your PC for resources.

[Jason Carr]

On 5/13/2017 at 10:28 PM, cammelspit said:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

App:     Big Box
Version: 7.10-beta-6
Type:    System.NullReferenceException
Site:    Void (Int32)
Source:  Unbroken.LaunchBox

   at (Int32 )
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Root.SafeTerminate(Int32 exitCode)
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App..ctor()
   at ()
   at Unbroken.LaunchBox.Wpf.BigBox.App.Main()

Recent Log:

   10:26:45 PM Exception

Tried a 100% fresh install on another drive and BB won't even open. Ironically, the old install does open. I guess I broked it again.

Ha, you found a bug with the betas. Thanks cammel. Fixed for the next one.

[Jason Carr]

Also, I have a feeling this will probably pop up for more people in the future, so I am going to use one less core/thread if playing a startup video.

[cammelspit]

35 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Also, I have a feeling this will probably pop up for more people in the future, so I am going to use one less core/thread if playing a startup video.

You are probably right. There is just no other way that I can think of that would work better. Besides, nearly the entire time my CPU percentage is actually rather low aside from spiking. Since my collection is somewhat of a worst case scenario, it should be rather effective.

41 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

Ha, you found a bug with the betas. Thanks cammel. Fixed for the next one.

Hehe, I do tend to bring out those quite often.

[spektor56]

Finding bugs is good because its a boring job for a programmer to do.

MaxDegreeOfParallelism = (Environment.ProcessorCount - 1 > 0 ? Environment.ProcessorCount - 1 : 1) usually works pretty well.

[Jason Carr]

That's the logic we currently have @spektor56, but I think we need to reduce it once more for the startup vid.

[JuanHeSi]

13 hours ago, JuanHeSi said:

Hi there, Im using vlc for launchbox engine since the install. I will try turning game mode off (I think that came by default on with the creators update this weekend) later tonight and get back to this thread to share if there are any better results 

Well I´d would like to share that with game mode off and using windows media player instead of vlc, things got back to normal... at least I think so . It appears windows 10 creators update brings some changes to the way full screen works, and some programs or emulators or games got broken on this mode (at least some forums assure that they still work in windowed mode). Just to be sure I checked the "disable full screen optimizations"  compatibility option in the properties windows of the bigbox exe file.

Thanks a lot to @keltoigael for bringing the question on which engine and thanks to @cammelspit for a topic on a similar problem to talk about it. As Always thanks a lot to the mods, admins and contributors to the topic for helping out as soon as posible  this forum is a great place for us newbies!

[y2j420]

I'm wondering if this bug is, in part, why platform videos in themes, fail to display at all when the machine come sup from a cold start?  It'll either launch and not display the video or it'll launch and display only a black screen (sound will work on button presses and joystick movement).