garageCube

Hello there,

Running MM 4.0.5 here. I have 42 surfaces in my project. One of my cues assigns a Spout input which is 1920*1080 to those 42 surfaces.

When triggering that cue, MM freezes for about one second. Weird thing is that if I give a fade time of one second to this cue, it ramps up smoothly, but freezes when the fade finishes.

Is there anything I can do on my side to avoid this freeze when the cue switches? And, more out of curiosity, why does the media start fading in smoothly but freezes all of a sudden when the fade is about to finish?

Thanks in advance, cheers!

please first provide more details about your media
regarding your computer OS and specs too

Hey there,

Indeed, forgot to provide more background information.

I'm running Windows 10 with a GTX Titan GPU, 32GB RAM, and an i7-3930K CPU @3.20 Ghz.

Looking in Task Manager, the GPU and CPU don't seem to freak out that much.

As for the media, it's a full HD Spout stream sent from vvvv.

thanks for the specs

try to send us a log file, to do so, Ctrl+Click on Tools menu, choose "Enable Log"

then you can restart MadMapper, reproduce the issue, and send the log with menu Tools / Send Current Log.

Please write to us on support@garagecube.com when it's done so we can check the received log files.

Hey there,

Will do, thanks for the heads up.

why does the media start fading in smoothly but freezes all of a sudden when the fade is about to finish?

When the fade finished, MadMapper will stop any previous media running on any of the surfaces. So I see two possibiities:
1- you had a camera on a layer, when the fade ends, MadMapper will tell the capture driver it doesn't need to receive the stream anymore and the (crappy) driver blocks the calling process for some reason. That can be avoided in MadMapper by checking the option "Keep running" in the camera properties (then the camera driver will always stream to MadMapper)
2- you had a lot of movies on all your surfaces, when the fade ends on all surfaces, MadMapper will release all those movies memory (it does so because you might want to have 100 movies in your project and we don't want to use 100 MB per movie, that would make 10 GB...). For some reason releasing this memory would be costy
3- for some reason when MadMapper stops the previous medias & release GPU resources (one or more textures), the GPU drivers blocks... I doubt about it but we've seen so many thing with OpenGL drivers on Windows... Keeping graphics drivers up to date is always good, and for nVidia there's a "studio driver" that is more stable than the other driver (gaming or something)

If you let me know what content you have on the surfaces before assigning this spout source, we'll understand

Hey, thanks for getting back to me.

Sure, let me try to explain what's going on.

I have 42 surfaces in my project. These 42 surfaces are duplicated 3 time, each time in a new group :

- Group 01 (bottom-most) : an HAP background loop that's always playing in MM (4932*1228 pixels)
- Group 02 (middle) : some content overlayed on that loop that comes from various Spout sources. In some cases, not all 42 surfaces will display content, which is why the bottom-most always plays our background loop file, so that when a surface is disabled in this group, something still shows up.
- Group 03 (topmost) : video transition (playing in MM) that are triggered by vvvv. These transitions are on top of all the surfaces, they are meant to cover everything. While the transition hides everything bellow it, I switch cues to display new content in the middle layer. As a consequence, when the transition ends by fading out to alpha 0, new content is revealed in the surfaces.

Now, the hiccup :

In my first cue (let's call it CUE01), I have the following setup :

- The background loop media is assigned to all surfaces of the bottom-most group (the one that's only meant to play background loops)
- 9 low resolution Spout inputs are assigned to some surfaces in the second group
- The transition media is assigned to all surfaces of the topmost group, but not playing

CUE02 has the following setup :

- The background loop media is still assigned to all surfaces of the bottom-most group
- A single Spout input which is 4932*1228 is assigned to all 42 surfaces of the middle group
- The transition media is assigned to all surfaces of the topmost group, but again not playing

The hiccup occurs when I switch from CUE01 to CUE02 (and also from CUE02 to CUE01)

First time using MM, so I might be taking the wrong approach from the very beginning

Thanks in advance.

Ok, did some more testing, it looks it has a hard time releasing the 9 clips that are playing before I switch to the cue. Because if I create a cue with just one fat Spout (4000*1200 px) assigned to 42 surfaces, and switch to the cue that has the full HD spout also assigned to 42 surfaces, it seems to run just fine. But releasing 9 clips, even if they have a small resolution seems to cause the issue.

Is there a hidden setting or something like that that allows to prevent the disposal of medias?

Thanks

That's weird. What codec are you files ? Do you have enough RAM ?
Maybe you activated hardware acceleration for video decoding ? That would mean we create Direct3D contexts for video decoding, which could explain. You should not use hardware acceleration on Windows on a decent computer. CPU decoding is efficient and multi-threaded and more reliable.