Green Bar when GPU Acceleration ON

[maff]

Confirmed: switching the power state to High Perf solves the problem. nice going, kngtrider!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Oh, god... What can we do except force nVidia to not go to PowerSave?

[kngtrider]

I don't think windows profiles put the GPU into power save - NVIDIA it has its own power save system which has worked fine since i started using that card.
ATI has power play and now something called bacon ... but i don't know how far these integrate into the OS these days

WHen i mentioned the issue to someone and the problem i found, he thought that the power saving was crippling the bus bandwidth hence the video errors

on vista pcie link power management can be on or off

on windows 7 it can be pcie/link state power management 'off' 'moderate power savings' 'maximum power savings'

On a overall level it does make sense that if the pcie link bandwidth is crippled or if there's a delay in switching the link speed it could affect some app

This isn't the first time I've seen power saving affect multimedia.

Gigabyte's proprietary power saving software called Dynamic Energy Saver interfered with system latency so much that it affected VOIP or audio latency significantly.


quick and dirty fix. when launch VLC have it set power profile accordingly.

Some commercial DVD/Bluray playback software integrate windows power profile control into the software by either overriding choice or installing a profile , Arcsoft definitely installs its own power profile , I don't remember if PowerDVD does, from my experience with the product im pretty sure it at least overrides power settings.

This is a can of worms. If VLC starts interfering with windows power profiles such as either installing its own profile, modifying existing profiles or overriding the users choice of profile, users will experience different usage behviours, battery life will be affected and worst case users batterys will prematurely accumlate wear cycles.

Going foward accelerated video and battery life is a an important topic. One of the Tier 1 vendors demoed a sandy bridge playing the entire lotr trilogy on


I think the next stage is to test wether ATI does it , and what chipsets do/don't do it. I dont have ATI PCIE on hand at the moment.

Im using a P45 chipset, the graphics card is in a pcie 2.0 slot running at the maximum spec.

How is Windows Media Player 12 or other DXVA2 enabled software handling the situation then?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I don't have any issue with the ATI GPU decoding.

[kngtrider]

What about with different power modes selected?

Why are certain videos of certain heights affected and others not affected even if power saving solve or cause the the issue?

[VLC_help]

Why are certain videos of certain heights affected and others not affected even if power saving solve or cause the the issue?

Driver issue most likely,

[feisty]

Guys, thanks for taking the time to investigate this issue. I can confirm that the Power Mode was the cause of the green bar in my case. (Trying to be greener with my PC and setting Power Options to minimum). In fact, I have been battling with 3 different video cards to play .MKV files without artifacts, pixelation and intermittent frame freezes, despite each video card claiming to be HDMI/1080p compliant.

I had reached the point of converting all .mkv files to .mp4 so I could actual enjoy a movie played on my PC. During one of my conversion sessions, with the cpu running at 100%, I accidentally started playing an .mkv and it played perfectly in VLC. Dropped the CPU to idle and the green bar appeared. That's when I jumped on the VideoLan forum and found this thread. (Should have done it sooner as I now have several video cards ready to hit ebay.)

Thanks again for the solution!

[Squuiid]

OMG, this was driving me insane! I changed the driver settings in the nVidia Control Panel from 'Adaptive' to 'Prefer Maximum Performance' and my VLC latency, sound glitching, mkv playback problems have disappeared!

Thank you very much for posting this info!