Flickering overlay when playing back D2D with "overlay during playback" turned on

[erkme73]

I've had this issue from the moment Ken added the option in V4. At some point, he added the ability to retroactively add the overlay data back onto the replay stream so that direct-2-disk recordings could still show that info.




With this option turned on, when viewing either on the BI android app, in UI3 or in IE with the default.htm page, the overlay flickers, and the frame rate becomes very jerky.

Here are two videos - both of the exact same clip screen captured from IE on the default.htm page.

The first is with the option turned ON:



The second is with the option turned OFF:





Has anyone experienced this?

I was really hoping that migrating to BI5 would have this resolved, but alas, it's still happening, independent of browser, client page, or device. I have also tried this with replacing the contents of the text overlay with static text (removing all variables) and the flickering/strobing continues.

 

[erkme73]

Well, I can see this is probably not a very wide-spread issue. I reached out to Ken, and he just got back with me.

... this would be caused by a race condition ... the threads running decoding and re-encoding for steaming are using the same set of buffers ... the encoder needs to stay ahead of the decoding in order to prevent flickering. I have opened up the buffer to 5 frames, was 3. This means more memory used when streaming BVR, but should help with the issue.

Anything you can do to lower demand will help. The semi-transparent background drawing uses a lot of CPU for some reason, so that slows the pipeline down.

One of the last updates incorporated the change, and to his credit, the problem was 90% resolved. Changing all 35 camera overlays from semi-transparent to fully opaque (100%) eliminated any remaining glitches.

As is the norm, Ken proves once again he knows his stuff and provides unparalleled support.