[v6 General Discussion] Lagging issues

We are running 6.5.5 on an i7 windows 10 desktop, with a Radeon video card. I know that these cards aren't in the "recommended" hardware specs. We went with this card because of the ability to use EDID, to control 6 video outputs, without issues. We wanted the ability to project PPT files from a guest speakers laptop, from the pulpit, when needed, and using switches to control where the feed was coming from (projection PC in the AV booth, or laptop from the pulpit). This caused major issues when we moved from an analog (VGA) feed, to a digital feed. When we would need to go from the projection PC, to the pulpit, and back to the projection PC, we would lose the screen configuration during the switching process. This is when we found out about EDID, and its ability to keep all screen configurations, even if we physically unplug a screen from the video card, and then plugged it back in later!

Now to our problem, we play video announcements, that I create, before the service on Sunday mornings. These videos are rendered as 1080 x 1920 HD mp4 files. These files play great on my laptop. They play great on the projection PC if we play them through VLC, but when we play them through EasyWorship, the audio and video are out of sync. This doesn't only happen on videos that I have created, but any video that we play through EasyWorship.

One thing we noticed is, if we uninstall and reinstall EasyWorship, this will help, but this isn't something we want to do every week, as there must be a better solution!

We also are having a lag issue in slide transitions. It takes about a full second to move from one slide to the next within a song. We have removed any delay in this transition, setting it at 00.00 seconds in the options area, with the ease in and ease out slider remaining in the middle position.

The others on our tech team want to make the move to Propresenter, but I really want to keep EasyWorship, but if we can't get videos to play properly, then we may need to make the move. We have been long time EasyWorship users.

Hi,

Please provide the model of radeon card you are using. We normally recommend using an edid emulator which is an external device. It sounds like the video card is struggling to render the content using directshow, which is a component of DirectX. EasyWorship has to use this in order to handle video transitions and apply text over videos. You won't have that issue with VLC as it doesn't have to do anything but play the video.
I was wrong on the type of card we put in. It isn't a Radeon based card, we put in a Matrox C680 PCIe x16.

We did some "minor" testing last night, and we are pretty much convinced that it isn't the PC, the card, or EasyWorship, but rather the long and complicated feed line we have running to the projectors. This video card has 6 mini DisplayPort connections, we are running from the video card with a mini DP to HDMI cable, then into HDMI to Cat6 converter, we make the 120'+/- run to the projectors and convert back from Cat6 to HDMI, then we have an HDMI to DVI-D cable to the projectors. Our current projectors only have a DVI-D digital port. We are thinking that with all those conversions happening, we are introducing latency into our system.

We set the output on EasyWorship to our secondary desktop monitor and played a video in EW, and it played perfectly. We also played the same video in VLC, on that same monitor, with the same results. We then put the EW output to the FOH projectors and saw the lag. We also played the same video to those monitors in VLC with lag. We then did a very simple thing, we grabbed the VLC window and place half of the window on the desktop monitor and half on the FOH projectors, and "shook" it with the mouse, and there you could see the latency between the two screens!

We need to figure out a way to reduce the latency in the FOH feed, or add it into our computer channel on our sound board.
We have tested Matrox cards in house and have found that they do not work well or sometimes at all with EasyWorship. These cards are not designed to run video graphics intensive software like EasyWorship or video games. They are created to run applications like CAD which renders video differently than video games.

The Matrox 680c costs about $615.00 while the Geforce GTX 950 only costs about $116.00 and up.

But the Geforce will not have the 6 outputs on it. If you need that many outputs there are other ways to get the outputs to work.

You can see in this comparison from http://www.videocardbenchmark.net

[attachment=0:2fy7tomc]matrox.png[/attachment:2fy7tomc]