Direct show video renderers suck?
- by Daniel
So I've been looking into the world of media playback for windows and I've started making a C# Media Player using DirectShow. I started off using the VRM-7 windowed video renderer and it was brilliant except it had a couple of small problems (multi monitors, fullscreen). But after some research I found that it's deprecated and I should be using VRM9.
So I changed it to use VRM9 windowless then found out that was an old post rofl _< so finally I'm using Vista/Win7 (or XP .net 3) Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR) which is apparently the most up to date Microsoft video renderer and has all the flashy performance/quality things added to it. (tbh I haven't noticed any difference but maybe I need a blue-ray or HQ video to notice it).
With using EVR everything is working fine except resizing the video. Its really laggy/choppy/teary and problem something to do with its frame queueing mechanism.
To demonstrate my problem
open up windows media player classic.
View - Options - Playback - output
Chose the "EVR" DirectShow Video renderer
Now restart wmp class and play a video, while it's playing click and drag a corner to resize it. You'll notice its horribly laggy. This is the exact same problem i am having.
But if you chose "EVR Custom Pres. *" or EVR Sync *" resizing works beautifully! So i tried googling around for anything about EVR resizing issues and how to fix it but i couldn't believe how little i could find. I'm guessing "Custom Pres." stands for "Custom Presenter" which sounds like they made their own.
Also you'll notice on the right hand size when you swap between EVR and the other EVR's the Resizer drop down on the right greys out.
So basically I wan't to know how I can fix this retarded resizing problem and is there any decent documentation out there? There is a fair bit for VMR7/9 but not much for EVR. I downloaded the DirectX SDK which apparently has samples but it was a waste of 500mb of bandwidth as it had nothing relevant.
Perhaps there is some way to force it not queueing up frames if that is the problem?
If you want code say the word and I'll paste some in. But it's really quite simple and nothing much happens, i'm convinced it's a problem with the EVR renderer.
EDIT: Oh and one other thing, what does VLC use? If you go into vlc options and change the renderer to anything but default, they all suck. So is it using VMR7? Or its own?
