MPC-HC v2.2.1

[James Freeman]

Thank you, that did the trick.
I had all internal filters disabled since I've used up-to-date LAV Filters.

[theultramage]

I've been having a long-standing issue with mpc-hc. Normally it opens and seeks video instantly, but after certain uptime (1 day, 10 days, 30 days?) I get a 5-second loading lag where the entire desktop nearly freezes, and every seek takes 1 second. Switching output from EVR to default (or others without DXVA) halves these delays, but it's still noticeable. I have no idea how to even begin troubleshooting this. So far I only know that rebooting fixes it, until it happens again. Should I make a separate thread for my issue?

Win7 x64. Radeon RX 550 with driver 18.11.2 (2018-nov-19). Constantly open apps: Firefox 54, Steam, MPC-HC 1.8.4, Nox 6.1.1.0 (VirtualBox 5.1.14).

[clsid]

Disable hardware acceleration in the video decoder. It could be a driver bug or a memory leak somewhere. Try closing Firefox.

@James, if you delete the LAVFilters folder from MPC-HC, it will use your external copy for the internal stuff as well.

[theultramage]

Closing all running programs doesn't help. I tried fiddling with the decoder settings. I went from DXVA2 (native) to None, and then to NVIDIA. I also tried the default renderer again. No improvement. Then I flipped to DXVA2 (copy-back) and suddenly it recovered. I changed back to DXVA2 (native) and it remains working. So toggling things back and forth seems to have reset something. Next time it happens, I will try to identify which change exactly it was.

@James The advantage of the HTTP(S) filter is efficient direct streaming and seeking, all in-memory. The disadvantage... there used to be a problem with Youtube's idle timeout, but it seems that's now fixed, at least in youtube-dl.
The advantage of the File filter is having a local fully buffered copy. The disadvantage is that the entire video has to be downloaded to %temp% (unnecessary SSD wear), have to wait a while until you can start seeking, and if you seek twice into an unbuffered region, mpc-hc perma-hangs.

[Motenai Yoda]

Originally Posted by theultramage

Normally it opens and seeks video instantly, but after certain uptime (1 day, 10 days, 30 days?) I get a 5-second loading lag where the entire desktop nearly freezes, and every seek takes 1 second.

try CrystalDiskInfo

[Wakaku]

Try this as well. Click View main menu, then Renderer Settings, then Reset, then try both Optimal and Default, and find out which is better. Then slowly re-pick previous personalized settings, and find out one by one which among them could be the potential culprit.

[theultramage]

Hum, renderer settings. I never touched those, however the settings "Vsync, Accurate Vsync" were enabled. Default is both off, optimal is "vsync off, accurate vsync, alternate vsync". I checked the descriptions at https://trac.mpc-hc.org/wiki/New_Renderer_Settings however I'm confused why 'vsync off' is the optimal state. Anyways, I'll add this to my testing list if/when the glitch happens again.

[huhn]

VSync

Can be used to disable VSync. This is not recommended normally, as disabling VSync will remove many stuttering and threading fixes. This item is only disabled for debugging purposes.

i clearly read this as on be default...

[Wakaku]

I remember now, I have somewhat similar experience. This is how it happens/happened to me. After viewing/opening many videos especially one after another (especially if you have let's say a 1 TB or 2 TB portable drive full of videos and you have all day or half to watch them), MPC-HC will gradually consume Windows 7's FREE memory. Open Windows Task Manager, go to Performance tab, then below the Physical Memory (MB) area, you'll see Free is almost zero or already zero. When that happens MPC-HC is in the state you described earlier. Especially if you have only a total of 4 GB memory modules. Thus I also need to restart Windows 7 too before. Logging off and back on may only free a little memory (check Performance tab again).

Such issue never manifested with MPC-HC when I was still at Windows XP even with 4GB memory, as in never. It happened after I switched to Windows 7. Right now I upgraded to 16 GB memory, thus it would take very long before the Free memory reaches zero, hence I almost don't experience the issue again.

If you don't have enough physical memory, then you have to free it yourself. My previous method was to use 7-Zip to ULTRA compress a movie file (around 900+ MB) into 7z format. Just allow 7-Zip to compress the huge movie file, then wait until 7-Zip is stucked at whatever percentage because there is no more enough memory. Then cancel. Free memory will be big again. Of course my 900+ MB movie file was applicable when I had only 4 GB memory back then.

Right now my method is to use the open-source MemPlus (by CodeDead, in GitHub) to free memory by one click (the "Clear memory" button).

[lvqcl]

Originally Posted by Wakaku

After viewing/opening many videos especially one after another (especially if you have let's say a 1 TB or 2 TB portable drive full of videos and you have all day or half to watch them), MPC-HC will gradually consume Windows 7's FREE memory.

I suspect that it's just Windows caches files in memory. Usually it's good, and nothing to worry about.

[Wakaku]

Originally Posted by lvqcl

I suspect that it's just Windows caches files in memory. Usually it's good, and nothing to worry about.

Indeed. Most definitely. I think it would also happen via usage of other programs until the Free memory reaches zero. But when that Free memeory reaches zero in Windows 7, for the earlier User and my past experience for MPC-HC's behavior in Windows 7 are somewhat alike.

Well, that was my story or scenario, wonder what would be his.

[theultramage]

Nope, it's not a disk or memory usage thing (no disk activity during startup, plenty of ram to work with).
Yes the Vsync setting is supposed to toggle it 'on', so I'm baffled as to why both 'Reset to default' and 'Reset to optimal' leave this option unchecked.

I wouldn't be surprised if this issue is caused by some sort of communication stall between directx and the GPU driver. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Vsync option was the issue. Still, very odd that toggling the renderer mode back and forth made it recover.

I don't trust this GPU much. The overnight system assessment job would frequently crash the display driver and leave a striped pattern with background noise on the screen (https://imgur.com/a/VVM7Z9G) until I turned the scheduled task off. Currently if I leave more than one MPC-HC video instance paused overnight, sometimes one of them crashes.

[clsid]

I doubt it is related to VSync. Your driver is just crappy.

DWM (desktop composition) already does VSync on Win7+. The option in MPC has minimal effect.

[theultramage]

Ha, classic theme disables desktop composition. And I'm not too happy with the latest official amd drivers either, but so far I haven't seen them misbehave in any other ways. Well, except the annoyance of the bloated RadeonSettings.exe staying resident after 'exiting' it.

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

Originally Posted by theultramage

Well, except the annoyance of the bloated RadeonSettings.exe staying resident after 'exiting' it.

Are you not able to set it to not start up with Windows via msconfig or the like?

[NikosD]

@clsid

Is there a way for MPC-HC v1.8.4 to register itself as the default program for every file (video, audio) supported by the app in Windows 10 October 2018 update ?

I mean to make it default for all supported formats at once, not file (format) by file (format).

[clsid]

Start > run > ms-settings:defaultapps

There you can select MPC-HC as preferred audio and video player. that takes care of almost all supported extensions.

[huhn]

mpc-hc doesn't get listed as a video player. music works fine

[clsid]

Step 1:
MPC-HC options > Player > Formats > Run as admin and register the desired extensions

Step 2:
Set it as preferred in Windows settings

[huhn]

well i fixed it by manually adding one video format to mpc-hc. it worked after that still inconvenient.

Step 2:
Set it as preferred in Windows settings

if you mean default apps with this no running the admin thingy didn't changed anything for me.