Completely distorted menus... colorful mess

[Juncti]

Ok, haven't seen this one posted before. I just upgraded to the latest release today because my MVP arrived in the mail. Got it running fine and watched a movie on the MVP.

Then I came into the main room and watched a show on the server. When I finished and deleted the show I just watched, the menu went into a complete colorful mess.

I thought it was the fade as the color pattern changed as the fade took place. I disabled the fade and the problem continues. I can see the main menu clear as day. Then when I go to any sub menu the color pattern appears, but I can still read the menu. Going one level deeper produces a screen that can hardly be read. Some menu options are visible but most are gone. (See picture) Seems the deeper you go the worse it gets. However choosing live tv from the main menu renders tv without problem. Stop the show and it's back to colorful chaos.

Any ideas?

[flavius]

Is that reproducable after a restart of the server? Does dxdiag find any errors?

[mc2wheels]

I deleted a few files in a row, and I my screen went all crazy too. I shutdown my client and restarted it to make things go back to normal.

[mkanet]

This is a known issue.. 3D memory limitation in SageTV. If you have too much graphics and text display on the screen, SageTV starts displaying distorted pologon effects. Since I have a lot of text in my menus in relatively small fonts, the only way it looks right is if I use Overlay mode (direct3D off); although, that's not the reason I am using Overlay.

The funny thing is that I've heard of people having this problem with even a 256mb display adapter. Who knows.. it might be a Java/direct3D limitation; not necessarily SageTV's limitation.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by mkanet

This is a known issue.. 3D memory limitation in SageTV. If you have too much graphics and text display on the screen, SageTV starts displaying distorted pologon effects. Since I have a lot of text in my menus in relatively small fonts, the only way it looks right is if I use Overlay mode (direct3D off); although, that's not the reason I am using Overlay.

The funny thing is that I've heard of people having this problem with even a 256mb display adapter. Who knows.. it might be a Java/direct3D limitation; not necessarily SageTV's limitation.

Didn't realize people were actually running into that limit. SageTV defaults to only using a max of 32MB of VRAM for texture memory in the 3D engine. You can change that with this property: ui/video_memory_image_cache_limit=

Please let me know if that helps resolve this issue for you.

[mkanet]

Hi Jeff, I already tried fooling with the 3d memory settings in the properties file a while back (3.x beta). It doesn't really help fix this limitation. I tried doubling and even trippling the amount of memory reserved.

Its super easy to reproduce this:

1) Load Malore's Custom Menus STVi'
2) Change font size to 10
3) Change # of rows to 20.

This would be a typcial config for a high res display (exact settings I use for my SageTV).


I guess, I would be pretty frusterated if I wanted to use VMR9 and couldn't because of this...

[Narflex]

mkanet,

I did what you said but didn't have any problem. I imported Malore's STVi. Then went to the EPG and changed the font size to 10 and the number of rows to 20. All was fine. If we can reproduce this then we should be able to fix this. I wouldn't classify it as a known issue.

[mkanet]

Jeff, have you tested this wtih high display resolutions? I have my resolution set to 1920x1440@72Hz.

PS: You might have to use the SageTV for a little while before the memory limit is reached. I have only tried this with an Nvidia display card (6600GT)

[Narflex]

I tried it at 1600x1200

[Juncti]

I completely rebooted everything and the problem has cleared, but I haven't put much load on it since the reboot. I had just finished streaming a good bit to my MVP, then came in and cleaned up some files and watched a show when the problem happened. I'll see if it happens again. I just figured I should screen shot it and document it while it was happening in case.

Not sure if it's related, but the first time I got my MVP working yesterday, it loaded and I went to play a file. A second of audio came out and the screen went completely green. Had to unplug and replug the MVP to get it running which it ran fine after that.

We'll see if the problem replicates this afternoon when I start using the system again.

Thanks for all the ideas.

[mkanet]

Very strange... I've seen people complain about this before from time to time. There has to be something these people have in common.

Maybe its okay to call it a known problem, but not known what causes it.

[mc2wheels]

and as I said, I was done deleting a show and whammo. I too am using MVP clients, but this happened on the main server machine/media center.

[stanger89]

Jeff, is there any up/downside to increasing that? I've got 128MB on both PCs that run Sage.

[Narflex]

There shouldn't be any downside as long as you don't run out of VRAM. The upside is that the 3D texture cache will be larger so if there's a lot of different images or fonts used then it might end up being faster if you were exceeding the cache size. There's debug log messages regarding when things are removed from the cache so you can watch that if you're really curious.

[ToxMox]

Jeff,
When you tried to reproduce this did you have malore's watched bars enabled? If not make sure you do and have some random watched durations on the shows listed. Maybe there is something in common with the type of video card people are using.

I can or used to be able to get this all the time on my main tower in my office that I used to use for Studio stuff. I haven't used that machine in a long time so I don't know if it is still doing it but I think I had a Radeon 9800 pro on there when it happened.

[mc2wheels]

I'm using a nvidia 6600GT with default stv with default settings.

[Narflex]

OK, we reproduced it. It was an easy fix. It'll be in the next release.

[nielm]

As mentioned elsewhere, this is still happening to me on 4.1.5..
Using Nvidia 5200FX 128Mb.
VMR9 Non-FSE
Sage window size 1280x720
Unsupported options enabled
Default recordings menu
Watched bars enabled
video menus=background/when active or window/when active

If I go into sage Recordings, and scroll until I see some recordings with watched bars, I will get the funky triangle effect.

If I select a show to trigger the Options popup, things go really wild...

Disabling watched bars makes the problem go away!

Playing some more...
If I edit the WatchedLength widget and set Corner Arc to 0, the problem also goes away -- maybe the lines are too thin to have a corner arc, causing something like a div/0 errors?

[cenwesi]

Yep, happened to me. I really for the a long time could not described this without taking picture like i did in one of my post. So how does one disable this watched bar.

[nielm]

Detailed Setup->Customise->Malore Menu Options->Watched Bars