Can't see video playing movie with Chemeleon

[blctech]

Hi. I am running Win 10 driving my LG widescreen, using PowerDvD. I run CCC on another Win 10 machine. Been doing this for a couple years. I use a QNAP box to store all the videos. I have the current update of Chameleon. Over the past few weeks I have had problems with starting a movie. The movie will start, bringing all the associated garbage that is on DVD's now a days. The system will play any of the trailers that are on the DVD with no problem. It gets to the DVD menu where I choose the audio and no captions. It then goes to start the movie. The screen goes blank and then as the movie starts to play, the video disappears and the TV error screen displays that states that there is no connection or source to the TV. The computer connected to the TV locks up with that screen and I cannot even Ctr Alt Del to break out. I need to reboot the computer. Strangely, sometimes I can hear the audio of the moving playing.

One note, if I navigate directly to the server and play the movie directly using PowerDvD, it plays fine. Only when I try to play it via Chameleon does it cause the problem above. I can no longer use Chameleon to play my movie collection. Any Ideas?

Thanks

[Pauven]

That's very odd, and I've never had anyone else report this issue.

What version of CMC and what version of PowerDVD?

Does it happen with DVDs, Blu-rays, and/or 4K UHD discs?

Please enable Debug Logging in CMC, then play a movie. Then you can turn off Debug Logging. In the CMC Logs folder will be some PlayClick debug logs, send me any recent ones.

[blctech]

Hi Pauven
CMC version is 7.0.2023.62 PDVD is 22.0.3008.62

I turned on the CMC logging. Played movie and saw nothing in the log.
What I did find is that the movie is playing video and audio behind the TV no-nput error-screen. I heard it playing so since I use my AV unit to control the inputs to the TV, I cycled through all the inputs and when I got back to the Computer HDMI input (to the TV) it displayed the playing movie as normal. Really weird. So I am not sure if it is the TV or the AV unit that is causing the problem

There is a lot of switching going on (Via PDVD) when a movie is selected to play in CMC. I will try to track it down. Maybe for some reason the TV is not waiting long enough to detect the input.

Brian

[Pauven]

Any chance you are using CMC's display refresh rate feature? Perhaps CMC is changing the refresh rate, and that's freaking out the TV.

[blctech]

No - I checked. The Auto display refresh is disabled.

Something chanced in the past few weeks because it never did this before.

[Pauven]

When did you upgrade to CMC v7? I was released at the end of October.

Display drivers might be related, they could have been updated.

Did you recently update PowerDVD? Change a PowerDVD setting?

One of your TV settings may have been changed. Perhaps it is scanning the inputs.

I've got an Optoma projector, and it has developed a weird blanking behavior over the past few months, and it's behavior seems related to what you're experiencing. It doesn't have anything to do with CMC. Rather, when I'm opening or closing Edge browser, the entire display blanks and the projector rescans for input on HDMI 1. It takes a few seconds, and it finally comes back. It sometimes does the same when I start streaming a video on Amazon Prime or Netflix.

It didn't use to do this - I've had the projector for years - and I find it annoying. Luckily I'm not getting error messages like you're getting. Yet it somehow seems related. My video card is an Nvidia 2080 Super.

As to why it only happens to you when CMC launches PowerDVD, perhaps it's related to the PowerDVD Launch Mode that is called by CMC. It might be that it's opening PDVD in Cinema mode, fullscreen. And when you launch PowerDVD, perhaps you're doing it in PC Mode, and/or windowed. The different mode might be affecting how the video card driver is engaged.

[Jamie]

Can you try to play another movie player like mpc-be through cmc so that we all may be able to determine whether this is just related to powerdvd. Also have you tried an earlier version of powerdvd? Just wondering whether it is powerdvd 22 that is just having the issue.

[blctech]

Hi Pauven - I don't believe I updated any drivers> I don't update PDVD too often because it always seems to cause a problem.

One think for sure, I am getting that entire screen blanking when PDVD starts the movie and just after the initial DVD start up stuff and before it gets to the menu. Which is better to use , cinema mode or PC Mode or just that CMC and PDVD are in sync?

@ Jamie. I will try to use another player

Brian

[Pauven]

I don't know that either Cinema or PC mode are better than the other. It's really a preference - I prefer Cinema. But I suggested this as it could help explain why your manual launch results differ from CMC launched results.

I think the blanking is related to hardware acceleration kicking in on the video card driver. Perhaps the trailers and main menu are encoded differently than the main movie, so when the movie starts the different encoding triggers something in the video drivers.

You may want to play around with the video acceleration settings in PDVD. Perhaps tweaking those can affect the result.

For example, I can turn off video acceleration in Edge and the blanking issue goes away, but unfortunately the streaming video gets choppy.

You may also want to look on your TV (or A/V receiver) and see if you can disable input source detection. It might be seeing the temporary blank video signal and starts a scanning process and because this takes time the error is generated.

And since you haven't updated drivers, perhaps doing so might help.

[blctech]

Thanks for the Info Pauven

You have something there as the trailers and menu do seem to be encoded differently or not at all.

I will check out your suggestions and get back with you on what I find.