Colorman3605 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 (edited) In the classic mode of launchbox I inserted the videos in the details. The videos start but randomly stop for a moment to start completely changed (see attached images) and then return to normal soon thereafter. The videos are mp4, I tried changing the various settings of VLC (from forum of vlc, flickering, etc ...), I also tried to convert the files in other formats but the problem only decreases in frequency. Does anyone have any other solutions to recommend? Thank you! P.S. In Launchbox.next all is OK! Edited June 22, 2018 by Colorman3605 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rincewind Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 What are your PC specs and windows version? LaunchBox.Next will be the standard version at some point so I wouldn't worry to much at this point Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro808 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 Like Rincewind said if all is good in Next than you will be good to go in the future since that will replace the current standard version. In the meantime try switching to Windows Media as the video setting in Launchbox and see if that affects the playback. It has helped for some members. It did for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colorman3605 Posted June 22, 2018 Author Share Posted June 22, 2018 You're right, but it was just out of curiosity, since the problem sometimes shows up when I see normal videos outside of the launchbox. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rincewind Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 That's why I asked for the PC specs because I have noticed it on my work pc which is an old core 2 duo with 2gb ram running Windows 7..... But my home pc which is much more modern I've never had that issue Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colorman3605 Posted June 22, 2018 Author Share Posted June 22, 2018 My PC: Windows 10 Intel(R) Core (TM) i5 CPU 650 @3.20 GHz 4 Gb RAM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 Usually those sort of grey static images in videos are due to HHD speeds not being fast enough. If you are running Launchbox on a HDD only then its reading/writing several things at the same time as trying to also play a video and that can cause issues from time to time. If you have ever tried moving two files to a HDD at the same time you can see this in action as both transfers will be much slower than they should be as the head is having to move a lot more to right the data required. I used to have the same issue while using VLC but found WMP to be much better, but that has some downsides also. What I actually do now is have Launchbox and all the images on a SSD, while keeping my roms and videos on a HDD, that way Launchbox is only reading the videos from the drive and not all the other stuff at the same time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DOS76 Posted June 22, 2018 Share Posted June 22, 2018 I have an old desktop with an i5 650 that is a pretty old CPU at this point. Not saying that is the reason why Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADMAN Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 I typed this on other threads, but FYI, these grey playback issues have nothing to do with Hard Drive speeds. The issues are due to an old version of VLC (2.2.6) being used in LB. Back then there were a lot of hardware overlay decoding issues that were later fixed and should not occur on the latest version (3.0.4 as of this writing). You can even reproduce this by installing 3.0.4 on your system and playing back any preview videos (no grey issues), and then manually open the VLC.exe inside \LaunchBox\VLC\ and drag and dropping a video preview on it (it will have grey playback issues, aka HW playback Overlay problems). Depending on your system, an option could be to open the player inside \LaunchBox\VLC\ like before, going to Tools->Preferences, and un-checking "Accelerated video output (Overlay)" in the Video tab: Please note that this is largely dependent on your system, so it might not work. @SentaiBrad, @Jason Carr any new info on this topic other than the workaround of selecting WMP? Hope this helps... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 44 minutes ago, MADMAN said: I typed this on other threads, but FYI, these grey playback issues have nothing to do with Hard Drive speeds. The issues are due to an old version of VLC (2.2.6) being used in LB. Back then there were a lot of hardware overlay decoding issues that were later fixed and should not occur on the latest version (3.0.4 as of this writing). You can even reproduce this by installing 3.0.4 on your system and playing back any preview videos (no grey issues), and then manually open the VLC.exe inside \LaunchBox\VLC\ and drag and dropping a video preview on it (it will have grey playback issues, aka HW playback Overlay problems). Depending on your system, an option could be to open the player inside \LaunchBox\VLC\ like before, going to Tools->Preferences, and un-checking "Accelerated video output (Overlay)" in the Video tab: Please note that this is largely dependent on your system, so it might not work. @SentaiBrad, @Jason Carr any new info on this topic other than the workaround of selecting WMP? Hope this helps... The issue indeed does have to do with hard drive/CPU/etc. speeds. It has to do with the hardware not being able to keep up with the video, and thus the artifacting happens. That said, I do recognize that the issue has been fixed in later versions of VLC. However, the issue does not exist at all currently if your hardware can keep up. I have upgrading VLC on the radar, but as there were such significant changes for the 3.x release, I have a lot of work to do to get it integrated (unfortunately things completely break currently when I try to upgrade to the 3.x series). So the upgrade is coming, but it may be a bit yet, unfortunately. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADMAN Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 As far as I know these issues are tied to the hardware decoding capabilities of the GPU, not other components. I ran tests with 3 different configurations, and on the highest spec system (8700k with 32Gb of Ram, Nvidia Titan X and raid-0 Samsung M.2 970 drives), the problem still occurs. The mentioned system is able to playback 4K and 8K video without a sweat, so definitely the hardware can keep up Great news you are working on upgrading to VLC 3.x! Not essential by all means, WMP is working perfectly on 2 of the systems I tested, the third was fixed by deselecting Accelerated Video (Overlay) in VLC prefs. As always, thanks for being on top of these issues Jason! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 1, 2018 Share Posted December 1, 2018 Just now, MADMAN said: As far as I know these issues are tied to the hardware decoding capabilities of the GPU, not other components. I ran tests with 3 different configurations, and on the highest spec system (8700k with 32Gb of Ram, Nvidia Titan X and raid-0 Samsung M.2 970 drives), the problem still occurs. The mentioned system is able to playback 4K and 8K video without a sweat, so definitely the hardware can keep up Great news you are working on upgrading to VLC 3.x! Not essential by all means, WMP is working perfectly on 2 of the systems I tested, the third was fixed by deselecting Accelerated Video (Overlay) in VLC prefs. As always, thanks for being on top of these issues Jason! Sure, it may very well be GPU related. Regardless, it is an issue only on systems that happen to be struggling to keep up. I do plan to revisit soon, but as I don't know how large of an undertaking it will be, I don't currently have a timeline. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MazJohn [Mr Arcade] Posted December 15, 2018 Share Posted December 15, 2018 I had that issue at one point In the past, but in my own case, updating from Vlc 2.x to 3.x helped a-lot to mitigate this issue... I still see artifacts (rarely) when switching between platforms, but changing the vlc version to the latest helped a good deal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted December 15, 2018 Share Posted December 15, 2018 2 hours ago, MazJohn [Mr Arcade] said: I had that issue at one point In the past, but in my own case, updating from Vlc 2.x to 3.x helped a-lot to mitigate this issue... I still see artifacts (rarely) when switching between platforms, but changing the vlc version to the latest helped a good deal. Are you talking about using VLC 3.x in Big Box? There's currently no way to use VLC 3.x in Big Box. It always uses the built-in version that's located inside the LaunchBox folder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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