Beta - Menu screen tearing

**ervin067** · December 26th, 2009, 01:27 PM

Hi, I'm currently having a problem with the boxee beta. I have looked around and didnt see any posts like this, so I though I would start a new thread.

I am running boxee beta and I am having screen tearing In both the menu and video playback. It seams like its not having any problems with 1080p playback, but it has a screen tear in the exact same spot as it does in the menu. If Im at like the movie selection menu and I hit left to see the side menu, you can see a very distinct tear about 1/3 of the way down the screen. I dont have any screen tearing issues with either boxee alpha, or my xbmc set up that I have running. I also checked and it appears to be running at the same hz as my tv (60 hz)

Any suggestions / questions would be appreciated.

HTPC Specs
cpu - 5050e
video card- 4650 low profile
2 gb ram
directx 10
running on 1080p plasma tv

Thanks,
Matt

**judgeschambers** · December 26th, 2009, 02:57 PM

Can you get a screen shot?

**ervin067** · December 26th, 2009, 03:41 PM

Every time I take a screen shot, it looks perfectly fine... Maybe knowing that helps more then anything else. Do you think that the resolution / refresh rate is somehow off?

Also, when I have it in windowed mode , it does not have any tearing issues.

Matt

**ervin067** · December 26th, 2009, 04:11 PM

Well after playing with it for a while, i think i may have found the problem. I have boxee on both my laptop and htpc. on my laptop it runs fine in both windowed and full screen (and at 60 hz all the time). On my htpc, it runs at 60 hz in windowed mode, but when i put it to full screen it drops to around 45 hz, and moves around. Im guessin this is whats causing the tearing.

Is there any way to force it to stay at 60 hz? do you think that I dont have enough processing power on my computer? Any thoughts are welcome

Matt

**Kyusaku** · December 27th, 2009, 07:24 AM

the hz is generally based on the monitor and how it's connected to the PC. Have you tried swapping video modes in Boxee itself and run some of the video calibrations? Also are you using the latest Catalyst drivers(9.12)?

**Regnix** · January 31st, 2010, 12:41 PM

I have the same issue, I see a tear 1/3rd down on the menus and on video playback - the tear is on some videos but not all. It seems to be mostly the lower quality stuff, I have some 720p and 1080p content that plays back fine. I have also found that VLC has the same tearing issue, whilst WMP Classic and WMP play the video back tear free.

The tearing issue occurs on both my monitor and when connected to my external HD TV (via HDMI).

I'm running Win 7 on an Asrock Ion 330, which I believe is an Nvidia 9400 (branded as Nvidia Ion). I have tried the drivers on the Asrock site, along with the latest WHQL and Beta drivers from the Nvidia site. I did a clean install of the Beta and I have also made sure I am running the latest version of Flash etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I really want to use Boxee to playback all of my videos.

Cheers,
Regnix

**dslate69** · February 1st, 2010, 05:31 PM

I had the same problem on one of my boxes and it worked fine on the other. I figured it out and was able to fix it. Both my boxes are Win 7 and have os support for x.264 which in my case was the problem.
When I installed cccp codec pack I must have chose "use windows built in 264 decoding". I ended up installing K-Lite Codec Pack (http://codecguide.com/) and choosing not to let windows do this but I am sure I could have reinstalled cccp and done the same thing. Either way the key is getting ffdshow to do the decoding.

**brainbone** · February 1st, 2010, 07:14 PM

The built in windows 7 decoders use hardware acceleration, and should be preferable to ffdshow in most cases.

W7 decoders require Aero be active to use DXVA, and not tear.
Go to: Control Panel-> Performance Information and Tools -> and click "Refresh Now". W7 should score your system, and enable Aero (unless you don't have hardware capable of supporting Aero).