WMP videos in BigBox have a corrupted effect at start

[salofan]

Having weird issues with videos in BigBox. Am on the current 13.22 beta, but was noticing this issue beforehand, as well. I'm using Windows Media Player for the video player per the current guidance. For a bit of context - my computer has a LG monitor and a Sony X77L television directly hooked up to it. I have a RTX 3070 for my graphics card. BigBox is set to open on the Sony TV. 

All videos played on my TV have a corrupted, black-screen effect for the first second or two. The sound plays, but the video image is glitching at the beginning. I've attached a short recording of what it looks like:

 

This effect happens on all MP4 videos: the Colorful platform sets, emumovies video clips, etc. 

Weirdly, this effect only happens on the TV - if I move BigBox over to my monitor, everything is normal, with no annoying black / artifacting effects.

And - webm files don't seem to have this issue and play fine. When I convert an MP4 to a webm, it plays fine on the TV through WMP.

Whenever I play videos independently on WMP legacy player on the TV, sans BigBox, the same black screen effect happens for a second or two. On the monitor - all fine.

Further, using VLC as the media player on the TV works just fine, regardless of the video format. Same with the modern media player that is included with Windows 11. The issues only seem to arise when playing MP4 videos - on my TV - using Windows Media Player legacy.

It looks like this is an issue with WMP, not BigBox, or it's an issue with some sort of weird interplay between WMP legacy and my Sony TV. Maybe something to do with my graphics card? I'm not sure why videos are working fine on one screen but not the other. Am I missing some codec that covers this scenario? I've installed the mega version of the K-lite codec pack. Nvidia drivers are up to date. Attempts to find solutions on the internet have not turned up anything.

Switching to VLC in BigBox for the video player solves this issue on my TV, but that introduces the stability problems warned about after a few minutes, and BB inevitably freezes up.

Has anyone else had this issue? Unfortunately, this is rendering BigBox pretty much unusable for me, as it's set up to be used on my television. I've been trying to track down the issue here for the better part of a week. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[salofan]

Bumping to see if anyone has run into this - problem still persists.

[andyco47]

im useing windows media player for playback and i just get a black screen but if i use vlc  all is ok i have done the k-lite download and still not working wmp is shit

Edited June 12 by andyco47

[MaxWulf]

I also get issues with WMP playback, also exceptions when returning from games.
VLC is super stable for me (no corruption, no exceptions and faster opening of all media).
I recently reencoded all my videos to h264 mp4's, the size difference and performance increase with VLC playback is significant ... the stability with WMP is worse.
For reference, all media plays fine in windows natively, from playlists, quick changing etc ... all previews and marquees are fine in Launchbox, but playback through BigBox with WMP is problematic. Please don't deprecate VLC until WMP is stable (and as a fellow dev who has been forced to released games using WMP for video playback I can safely say it sucks ass)

[salofan]

For what it's worth, this problem did seem to resolve when I opened BigBox through Steam Big Picture on my TV. For some reason, opening BigBox directly on my TV still doesn't work right, it does through Big Picture. Maybe something to do with the monitor selection? I believe Big Picture works by forcing your TV to be your primary monitor while it's active. 

[C-Beats]

This is a known issue with WMP, especially in multi-monitor environments. If you're using an Nvidia GPU you can go into their control panel and enable full range color range for the monitor in question and it'll correct this.