VMR7 issues: picture disappears

[chud]

i am trying to use VMR7 for video in GBPVR. i am using this antiquated method because i don't get perfectly smooth video with VMR9 on my system. best seen in scrolling credits or news tickers, but also noticable in pans, motion, etc. hardware $ would likely fix/improve it (P4 1.7, ati 9600) but alas...

i find overlay to give me the best picture and lowest cpu usage, but there are no aspect ratio controls to unstretch 4:3 or zoom in on letterboxed 16:9 on my 16:9 tv. no good.

VMR7 has aspect ratio control and seems to give similar video performance as overlay, albeit with more cpu usage, but the video will sometimes disappear. sometimes going into LiveTV the video will appear for a second then disappear. sometimes it will disappear on a channel change. it will always disappear on a fullscreen change or if another window is brought in front of the video and then removed.

is this a limitation of VMR7 or is it just me? if i open up lastgraph.grf in graphedit and play the video in its viewer there are no problems.

[sub]

This has always happened with the VMR7 renderer for some people. I'm not sure why, and dont have a work around for you. You'll need to either use Overlay or VMR9.

[sub]

You could try a different video decoder. It might help with VMR7.

[chud]

i have tried several decoders. also tried different versions of quartz.dll. nothing seemed to work, although i swore that once when i was fiddling it worked where the screen did not blank when behind other windows or fullscreen switched. i could not get it back again. it is funny though that the graphedit player seemed solid. could this have anything to do with the use of OSD's?

as an alternative, could the aspect ratio switching be made to work with overlay? i can almost do this now by using overlay and monkeying with the "zoom" parameters found in the config.xml. the problems are that it is static (can't be changed on the fly for different channels) and that it also scales the OSD. the fact that the OSD is not transparent is not an issue for me.

anyway, at least i know it is not just me. i will dig a little more...