MPC: Full screen pillarbox bars turn gray instead of black

[mikeggsm]

MPC-HC 1.5.1.2903 (tried other versions, same problem)

It's random, and it depends on the monitor: I have 4 monitors on a GTX 590 (Windows 7 x64) and sometimes the pillarbox bars on the left and right are black on all monitors (which is what I want) but often they turn gray on some monitors randomly and they stay that way.

WMP doesn't have that problem.

Any idea?

Thanks.

[JanWillem32]

Could you tell me which renderer is selected? In case of VMR-9 r., EVR CP or EVR Sync, do you use the "D3D Exclusive Mode" option or a windowed fullscreen?

[mikeggsm]

Could you tell me which renderer is selected? In case of VMR-9 r., EVR CP or EVR Sync, do you use the "D3D Exclusive Mode" option or a windowed fullscreen?

I use EVR, the plain vanilla one. Interestingly I just tried with EVR CP (windowed fullscreen, so D3D Exclusive Mode unchecked) and it seems never to create that problem: pillarbox bars are black.

The reason I use EVR is that I have cropping problems with EVR CP and the other EVRs. Example: if I download this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5vWhdq2LDI (Valkyrie Profile opening on PSX), in normal fullscreen viewing the whole video is zoomed a little so it is cropped on the borders compared to youtube's fullscreen (and compared to non full screen), part of the image is just missing (eg at 1:44 the clouds above are cropped). EVR doesn't have that problem and never gives any problems on any version. Is there a zoom feature in EVR CP that I could have unintentionally enabled?

[EDIT: Yes there is, I had enabled Video Frame -> "Zoom 1" instead of "Touch Window from Inside". Ahem. ]

[mikeggsm]

I think I know why...

Surprisingly with a 3GB video RAM Geforce GTX 590, Windows is constantly giving me that message "The current color scheme, Windows Aero, is using most of its dedicated memory."

The gray bars in full screen, being so random, are probably another symptom of video memory shortage.

But that doesn't explain why EVR has that problem and not EVR-CP.

[cyberbeing]

I believe EVR may default to gray bars (it did on my computer). Register evrprop.dll and you'll be able to change the border color.

[mikeggsm]

I believe EVR may default to gray bars (it did on my computer). Register evrprop.dll and you'll be able to change the border color.

In case you don't have evrprop.dll on your computer, here is a download link:
evrprop.dll from Windows SDK 7.0A (http://www.mediafire.com/?fuo5y5f2fkxii8a)

Before I saw your edit I got evrprop.dll from

http://satsharing.co.uk/dvb-software/1216-windows-sdk-tools.html

which has the 32 bit version (identical to your file) and the 64 bit version, as well as proppage.dll and graphedt.exe.

I'm sure EVR does not always default to gray because before I had the GTX 590 (only 3 monitors) I have never had that problem.

Now with 4 monitors and the GTX 590 the problem comes and goes randomly, which seems to prove that it's not a settings issue (although it could still be). I'll try your solution when I have the problem again, thanks.

[cyberbeing]

I've deleted my link, since the one you found is much more complete and a couple months newer (SDK 7.1 vs 7.0A).

[mikeggsm]

Gray bars came back, I installed EVR properties (works great), but the background color (in the VideoProcessor tab) is set to black and the bars still look gray.

It seems to be some kind of black level 16-235 / 0-255 mismatch between the decoder software and EVR on the geforce, because the bars are only gray with ffdshow, not with MPC Video decoder (which uses the geforce's DXVA hardware).

Apparently going through ffdshow's software decoder creates a mismatch "sometimes": "ffdshow software decoder -> EVR on the geforce -> monitor" has gray bars, but "DXVA geforce decoder -> EVR on the geforce -> monitor" doesn't.

[cyberbeing]

What version of FFDshow? If you uncheck NV12 in output does the problem go away? What about unchecking everything except RGB32?

Does the same thing happen with EVR in Zoom Player? If it happens in both MPC-HC and Zoom Player, it is likely a NVIDIA driver bug with SLI 4 monitor support on your card.

[mikeggsm]

What version of FFDshow? If you uncheck NV12 in output does the problem go away? What about unchecking everything except RGB32?

Does the same thing happen with EVR in Zoom Player? If it happens in both MPC-HC and Zoom Player, it is likely a NVIDIA driver bug with SLI 4 monitor support on your card.

ffdshow 3853 May 13 2011

I can't test with Zoom Player because I can't seem to force it to use ffdshow instead of the default Microsoft DTV-DVD video decoder (smart graph fails). With DTV-DVD the bars are black but that's probably because it uses DXVA: on MPC with DXVA they are also black.

Already tried all the supported colorspaces, only RGB32, etc, no luck. It's not a "usual" black problem because it concerns only the bars on the side, not the whole screen. The video's black level is correct. If the video content is black, it's much darker than the gray bars.

The only way to solve the problem every time is, in EVR Properties, to switch to VideoProcessor = the D3D reference software device. Very strangely, right now that device doesn't appear in the list. This is not a solution anyway: the software device is only for testing purposes, it has very few features and it doesn't smooth when scaling so the video looks pixelated in fullscreen.