As I understand it, Intuiface uses VLC player as the under-the-hood video engine. Is there anyway to tweak the decoding parameters to enable better video playback? I get a lot of random blocky video artifacting with .mp4 (usually at the start of a video) that may or may not show up again on subsequent plays. Encoding as a .mov file sometimes fixes it for Windows player, but I still get weirdness on the iPad.
If I tweak the settings of the actual VLC player app on my PC will it translate into a better video in Intuiface, or do you all use a preset “profile” that runs independently of the VLC settings?
Thanks in advance,
Dave
Dave Gaudet
General Atomics Publications Services
Hi @david_gaudet,
currently there is no way to tweak VLC parameters for decoding videos in intuiface. This leads me to several questions / suggestions:
- is it possible for you to send us your videoS (you may go through the support site if you need some privacy)? They are so many ways to encode videos that we are always eager to get video exposing issues so that we can try to fix our players
- on windows did you try to update your graphic card drivers, especially by using the latest driver from the GPU manufacturer (ie nvidia, AMD or intel)? Those drivers are often much better than the standard one provided by microsoft.
- do you experience any issue with the standard VLC reader?
- For my information, what kind of parameters would you like to tweak especially for this video in a VLC player?
Christophe
Sorry for the late reply. I’m going to try to put together a short compilation for the video.
One of the things that I did notice at showtime was the fact that even tho the original experience was built at 4k, we were forced (due to a last minute touch-screen swap) to run it at 1920x1080 HD. When we ran it in HD we had virtually NO trouble with any of the video. Now I’m wondering if maybe it was a function of the power of the GPU in the machine.
The PC we were running has two nVidia GTX 780 GPUs (not in SLI) and I thought that might have been enough…but maybe not?? What are your thoughts?
dg
hi @david_gaudet,
sure the GPU power needed for running 4K video in IntuiFace on a 4k display may be quite high.
As a hint, did you try running VLC (available at http://www.videolan.org/) with the same 4K videos and the same 4K display? For sure we cannot do better than VLC itself…
Christophe
Sorry for the late response…
I wasn’t able to test the 4k output full-screen on a 4k screen directly out of VLC because the highest res screen we have to develop on is only 2K. That said, the actual videos are only occupying a small part of the screen – effectively making them HD or less in a 4k XP. We do run into some artifacting while running the XP at 2k, but mostly only when I layer video with, say, a slide show. Given all that, I’m really thinking it’s a processing power thing. They keep threatening to buy me a 4k screen to run the XP, but so far they haven’t been able to get a screen larger than HD.
Which makes me wonder how much CPU is being used to scale the whole XP down to HD – and whether that is also affecting performance…?
dg
Has this changed at all? The allowing to tweak or added custom preferences would be very helpful! I’m running on a dell XPS 15 4k touch with integrated intel and nvidia video card in it. My issue is I’m getting grey tearing on mp4 files. This also happens in the standard VLC player. I found the solution here VLC pixelated gray screen - Page 1 - The VideoLAN Forums I just needed to change the File Caching from the default 300ms to 10000ms. This fixed the issue for me in the standard VLC player but in IntuiFace I run into the issue and I can’t find any way to fix it. I have the updated video drivers from both intel and nvidia. Having a way to fix this would be great so I can see what the experience will be on the production system.
Thanks,
Brett
Hi
Just to summarize the answer I made (privately) on the support to @brett.halsey, this information was very useful. We will enhance the VLC default video player in the product taking into account those info. We will certainly change some setting to avoid this issue. Few chances that we will open the player with all VLC parameters, we prefer select (or automatically select) the best parameters.
BTW, @brett.halsey it seems that VLC (the straight / standalone application) does not use directX acceleration in this specific PC (which is a shame as the GPU is a very good one). If you force it, VLC works much better too.
Christophe