Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc.multimedia (More info?)

For the last days I have been getting strange flickering playback problems
when trying to embed the windows media 10 within a web page on my Dell Axim
x50v. I have been using the suggestions from this group and using the
standard CLSID for wmp7+. This seems to be an issue on both ROM versions from
Dell A01 and A02.

While testing, the wmp10 player video area is displayed within the web page
and does seem to play. However, there are lots of horizontal lines across the
video surface and annoying visible refreshing. This does not happen in the
stand-alone player.

Interestingly, when I use the "Advanced profile" codec, these rendering
problems go away but the Advanced codec seems to take too many resources on
the Dell and there is audio clipping and dropped frames after a few seconds.
I can alleviate this by reducing the frame-rate, but I am looking for a
little better quality.

I am guessing that there is some kind of problem with the graphics
acceleration in the x50v. For example, by turning on "mirroring" or pausing a
video in betaplayer in the background, these rending issues go away. Of
course the wmp10 playback quality is then reduced because wmp10 is sharing
video resources with these apps, but it does serve to show that manually
reducing the acceleration helps the problem.

Does anyone else have these types of problems? Any solutions or workarounds?
What about other supported codecs in the wmp10 player? I am pretty stuck at
the moment...

Darren

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.pocketpc.multimedia (More info?)

Darren,

Based on your description, I'm fairly certain this is a video acceleration
problem. The Axim 50v is one of the very few devices on the market that uses
hardware acceleration (Intel 2700G Marathon 3D graphics accelerator ). As
you noticed, the problem doesn't occur with WMVA video. You'll probably find
that the problem also doesn't occur with Photostory 3 (WVP2) video. Here's
why: in order for video acceleration to work in the player, modifications
had to be made to the actual codec libraries. At the time when WMP10 and
Axim 50v shipped, support for Marathon had only been implemented for
pre-WMP10 codecs - and those didn't include WMVA and WVP2. So all content
encoded with those two codecs completely bypasses hardware video
acceleration. Unfortunately, this is not something Microsoft can fix because
we weren't the ones who modified the codecs to support Marathon - it's up to
Dell and Intel to make the necessary changes. You should try contacting Dell
support - even though they're probably already aware of the issue.

--
Alex Zambelli [MSFT]
WMP Mobile Test Team
------------------------------------
Please do not send e-mail directly to this alias. This address is for
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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.



"dcarlson" <dcarlson@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:8D078808-4137-42CE-9368-8AEF7FF4E90F@microsoft.com...
> For the last days I have been getting strange flickering playback problems
> when trying to embed the windows media 10 within a web page on my Dell
> Axim
> x50v. I have been using the suggestions from this group and using the
> standard CLSID for wmp7+. This seems to be an issue on both ROM versions
> from
> Dell A01 and A02.
>
> While testing, the wmp10 player video area is displayed within the web
> page
> and does seem to play. However, there are lots of horizontal lines across
> the
> video surface and annoying visible refreshing. This does not happen in the
> stand-alone player.
>
> Interestingly, when I use the "Advanced profile" codec, these rendering
> problems go away but the Advanced codec seems to take too many resources
> on
> the Dell and there is audio clipping and dropped frames after a few
> seconds.
> I can alleviate this by reducing the frame-rate, but I am looking for a
> little better quality.
>
> I am guessing that there is some kind of problem with the graphics
> acceleration in the x50v. For example, by turning on "mirroring" or
> pausing a
> video in betaplayer in the background, these rending issues go away. Of
> course the wmp10 playback quality is then reduced because wmp10 is sharing
> video resources with these apps, but it does serve to show that manually
> reducing the acceleration helps the problem.
>
> Does anyone else have these types of problems? Any solutions or
> workarounds?
> What about other supported codecs in the wmp10 player? I am pretty stuck
> at
> the moment...
>
> Darren