we are testing the new player and every functionality seems pretty spot on. The only problem is, that we don’t get smooth playback with at leastt 25 fps. this issue seems to be related to the window size of the player. on a windows workstation with two 4k monitors I am unable to play back full hd sequences 1:1 with a matching window size (I get around 16fps). with fullscreen playback, it seems a little better but also far from stable and smooth. resizing the window to a very small size seems to get fps in the 25+ range (but then it’ll too small of course).
I did test this on a macbook pro (intel) as well which seems to work better even if the window is across the complete screen (runs at 25 fps). But when upping the fps to 50 the player will only get up to 27-29fps. Then, when resizing the window to only a fraction of the screen, it seems to be able to play back at the full higher framerate.
Can you tell if you have enough memory to cache enough of the sequence for a smooth playback?
You can also check this option and set it to something low like 10% (it specifies how much memory is kept free for other processes).
memory is not the issue. exact same thing plays smoothly on rv on the same machine. If I resize the window (and I mean the chaos player application window) framerate goes up (!). the bigger the window, the lower the framerate. this happens with every sequence/clip no matter the length or resolution. It also doesn’t matter how much I see of the footage in the player (zoomed in/out, panned so it only show a fraction, etc.).
I have an installation of Chaos Player 2.00.21 on windows 10 and windows 11. And I am experiencing the same issues as noted above. It seems like the entire player interface is very slow, even if dragging an empty window around the desktop. In comparison, Pdplayer 1.0.7.41 is very fast and has no playback issues. I hope it resolves soon; I do use the older version daily.
On one system, I have two screens connected with a resolution of 2560x1440, and the other is just a laptop with a 1080p screen, and the Player lags the same way on both systems. Both have a large amount of memory available, and both have high-end graphics cards in them.
another thing i see (on the macbook, might be the same on windows) is the more layers I load in, the lower the maximum framerate becomes. I am testing this with up to four 1920x1920 clips (prores 422) and playing back at 50fps. with one layer visible I reach about 30 fps (which is not great either) and loosing about 3-4fps with every additional layer until barley holding 25 fps.
We have a pretty good idea why this is happening and it’s the next thing on our list.
It will may take a little while to get it right, though.
I’ll make sure to post here when we have something.
No ETA right now. We’re working on it, but it’s one of those things that may take 2 weeks, or it may take 2 months or more and we’ve only just started.
We need to get a few things rolling before we can do estimates on this.
One more thing I saw here was that when removing interface elements (e.g. layerproperties, timeline, etc) the framerate increased. But even when the framerate was high enough it felt like the playback was not 100% smooth.
The interface elements are part of the problem, yes.
Can you check if the entire sequence was in cache? The only reason would be if some frames are not cached when hitting them.
This line here on the layer indicates which frames are in cache
You can also check this option - it specifies how much of the available memory is kept free for other processes. For example, if you have it on 40%, try setting it to 10% and see if that helps.
We’ve been working on improving the performance in playback. Our internal tests show improvements, but it will be very helpful if you could give it a spin and let us know if things have gotten better.
The build is Windows-only and uses OpenGL, so you’ll need a decent graphics card.
So far we’ve tried a few different approaches and using OpenGL is the only one that showed promise.
@ronald_a , @daniel_simacek it would be very useful to get your feedback on this.
@yolov Hi, I had a look at that build and there is certainly improvment. As far as I can tell it doesn’t make a difference now if the layer properties panel is visible or not and also the size of the window is irrelavant now. Saying that, there still seems to be a slight framerate issue that makes the video not playback a 100% smoothly. on a 25 fps clip, the framerate is shown as 25fp 99.9% percent of the time but “flickers” to a different value constantly (Its so quick I can’t even read the value). Playing back the same clip in rv or even in vlc does play back smoother, though (I suppose with a more constant framerate).
two other observation I made are:
- I am unable to play back clips at 50 fps (HD, does work in RV)
- when playing back a clip and removing the focus (clicking another application, clicking on the desktop) playback sometimes gets really jerky. Also, when not playing back and removing the focus, the framerate drops massively (to around 4 fps). This might be intentional to save processing power, but if there is a chance that this mechanism somehow influences playback performance it might be good to look into it or get rid of it (I might be totally wrong here).
when I find the time, I will test this build on a single, non hdpi screen to see if there is anything difference there.
Hey, @ronald_a , thanks for the extensive feedback.
A few questions:
- when you say “clip” - what file format do you mean exactly? Now that you mention VLC it hints a video file to me. (VLC works in a completely different way, and also video file playback is expected to be slightly slower in performance compared to image sequences in Chaos Player).
- when you change the focus to another application - do you expect the player to pause the playback instead?
- no playback + changing focus = fps drop - yes, there is some code that does that. If you’re not playback while doing so, would it matter if the mechanism works or not ? I’m trying to understand why this concerns you.
- and lastly - can you check if you have RV set to ‘play all frames’ (basically it will skip frames if ‘play all frames’ is OFF, which is the default. The option is in Control > Play All Frames, the equvalent in Chaos Player is to right click on the FPS counter and select the mode from there).
