The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

whenever VLC is displayed on a display that is connected to my 2nd video card dwm.exe starts to use more and more memory until Aero crashes.

I can reproduce this problem on 2 different systems:
Sys1: Dedicated graphics card is a 6950 (catalyst 11.11, newest) on which I have my main display and the onboard card of a Z67 board to which I have connected a 2nd display as well as a TV. Once I pull VLC from the main display to one of the others dwm.exe basically crashes Aero after a couple of seconds (i5 2500k, 8GB DDR3, SSD 128GB, brand new system with newest drivers)
Sys2: 2x ATI 4850, not in crossfire mode so I could use 3 displays. Again, if VLC was used on a display that was hooked up to my secondary card : BOOM and Aero is gone

This seems to be a problem that has been discovered over 2 years ago, maybe even 3. Would be quite awesome if it could be fixed or somebody might be able to just post advice on how to change the preferences in VLC to fix this issue.

PS: Turning off Aero is out of the questions for me. Yes, I have the newest drivers, I'm just repeating that cause in the other threads this was brought up a million times.

try VLC 1.2 from Nightly Build of VLC

I'm having the same problem as the op. Running VLC on a display that is connected to a different video card from my primary display causes dwm.exe memory spikes. The size of the spikes increase based on the size of the VLC window. Full screen causes spikes over 1GB and causes Aero to disable itself.

I grabbed the latest nightly as was suggested when this was posted but did not see any improvement.

I did notice was that the memory spikes were much smaller, never over 400mb when I was monitoring, when watching a TV show (21:07 duration, 624x352 resolution) as compared to the first half of a movie (57:28 duration, 608x256 resolution).

Google brought me here and there were other (older) threads that had the same problem but they were either abandoned or derailed.

ATI card too?

That has to be a driver bug, since AFAIK there isn't way to control DWM directly.

ATI card too?

An ATI card is driving the primary Windows monitor (the one with the taskbar). An nVidia card is driving the display that I experience the issues on.

That has to be a driver bug, since AFAIK there isn't way to control DWM directly.

Agreed.

ATI card too?

Check!

It has nothing to do with VLC itself. When scrolling in FireFox or other fancy stuff the same problem appears.
I'm facing this problem for about a year now. First I really thought it was due to VLC, but recently I discoverd FireFox and some other programs have the same issue.
Searching the internet tells me there is like always some ATI card involved in this issue...

While typing I'm downloading the latest drivers to check whether it solves the problem.


For those who want a workaround in VLC: set video output to Windwos GDI output.
Unfortunately the image quality get's really bad (lot of blocks on the edges) :'(



Edit:
New drivers won't make any difference...