Gemstone rendering issues

[TwistedMelon]

First, I'd like to congratulate and thank everyone who has spent time working on Gemstone and its predecessors, Phoenix, BMT and all the other great plugins that are available for Sage. It's all this hard work that has given this platform longevity and kept it relevant. I'm also happy to be moving away from the v3 UI which I've run for so long because I can't stand the default v7 UI.

Running Windows 7 64bit server headless with HD200 and HD300 clients connected to 55" and 42" LCD TVs respectively.

SageTV 7.1.9 RC with plugins: current Gemstone, BMT and Movie Trailers (plus all their dependencies). These issues have all been observed with default settings and UI configuration options using the standard set of menus - no flows have been installed yet at this point.

ANIMATION SYSTEM in Sage settings needs to be turned OFF. First turn off all individual animation settings while the main setting is ON, then finally turn OFF the main setting. This will make sure that the entire animation system is off, usually guaranteeing the best possible performance. With the previous/default Sage UIs, it also guaranteed less glitches because continuous scrolling never worked with animation on.

These graphics rendering issues have been duplicated on both extenders, the attached photos were taken on the 42" LCD running on HD300.

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1. Moving the selection UP on the main menu produces partial triangle images under every menu heading



2. Recorded List, grouped by title, sorted most recent first, displayed using Simplified Gemstone view. When this list is entered either from the main menu or coming back to it from the media list, the currently selected group banner always has a break in it on the right. I have also seen this happen when scrolling up and down, but most often scrolling clears the glitch.



3. Displaying OPTIONS while browsing the Simplified Recorded TV group list and then scrolling the selection up and down will cause parts of the background to show through to the foreground. In the example image you can see parts of the banner coming through to the options-> customize menu to the left of the items "Show S/E," "Show Description," "Show Episode Description"



4. Scrolling up and down on the group options menu when browsing the Simplified Recorded TV group list will cause parts of the banner to show through the options menu. Clearly seen in the center of this image.



5. When displaying OPTIONS menus and customize menus, they are overlaid on the right side of the screen with a label written on their left edge "Main Menu Options," "Utility Functions" etc.. every time a sub-menu is selected it is overlaid over the previous menu and the label of the previous menu becomes dimmer. However, scrolling up/down will cause all labels to become more opaque/whiter every time the selection marker passes. The example image shows how the characters in the center of the title "Main Menu Options" are becoming white while from me scrolling up and down a few lines.

[jorton]

Was this also fixed by your server restart?

I've never seen the main menu messed up like that...

J

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by jorton

Was this also fixed by your server restart?

No. It's 100% reproducible on each of the two different extenders, both up to date on firmware. But I missed one crucial bit of information. You must have the animation system turned OFF to see these issues (at least the main menu one).

[jorton]

I can confirm it, just tried on my HD300. I have never turned the animations off before on an extender. Please log an issue,

http://code.google.com/p/gemstone/issues/list

Thanks,

J

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by jorton

I can confirm it, just tried on my HD300. I have never turned the animations off before on an extender.

In general, I just always found the UI a lot faster without the animations, and at least with the v3 UI, the animations really didn't add any visual wow anyway.

With Gemstone, the crossfades on posters and fade-ins for dialogs definitely look nice and I may consider selectively turning on some animations, but I'm not a fan of the triangle animation on the main menu though. And unfortunately the triangles and a number of other things are not controlled by the animation sub-options but can only be disabled from the main control.

Thanks for the URL, I didn't know if you guys had a bug tracker system or not.

[jorton]

Just a heads up that since the animation issue doesn't seem to present itself on a client we are not 100% sure what can be done to make the issue go away on the extenders other than to suggest turning animations back on for now. We will have a look but not sure we can do anything about it...

J

[jusjoken]

JOrton and I checked the code a little further and we can/should add an IF to all the animations Gemstone has added to disable these when the system based setting is OFF.

Open an issue and we will get it done one of these days

Configuring individual animations could also be added as we have to touch each on.... so mention that in the issue you open.

k

[TwistedMelon]

Putting a pin in this until tomorrow. I have my own customer support to finish up for today. At that time I will also turn ON all animations and verify each of these glitches so I can be sure to mention specifically if any of them occur at all times.

I've also seen some odd rendering of the check-mark (watched) icon (and other elements) on the HD200 when compared to the HD300, but I'll need to do a bit more investigating before I pin this one down.

What is the preferred manner to duplicate full UI/Gemstone settings from one extender/client to another? Export/Import?

[jusjoken]

Export then import on the other extender.

For clients... You need to copy the export file until then next version which will offer to export to the server from a client.

k

[TwistedMelon]

Sorry, not time yet to file the issue report at googlecode. Been sick this week and trying to do a ton of things despite it.

I've also verified that the PC-clint doesn't show any of the graphics issues I have seen with the Extenders, whether animations are ON or OFF.

But, on the PC client with Gemstone, just like with the old Sage3UI, animations ON causes issues with fast vertical scrolling through lists. This should happen for everyone: hold down the DOWN or UP button/key (on remote or keyboard) to quickly scroll through the main menu. You will see that the selection SEEMS to scroll so fast that the whole menu looks like its shaking and you can't see where the selection is at all.

With Animations off this doesn't happen and while the selection moves fast you can easily see where it is and the menu items continue to look "correct"

[TwistedMelon]

Found an issue that happens on the pc-client - haven't tested yet on Extenders.

Video renderer: EVR, Microsoft Decoders in Windows 7 Ultimate.

1. SageTV FULL SCREEN MODE
2. Watch a movie with an aspect wider than your current display - so you can see the empty/black letterbox area
3. Open and then close the OPTIONS menu
4. Note that the options menu now appears behind the video flashing quickly ON/OFF

[jorton]

I just tried it and am unable to reproduce. Kind of sounds like a video rendering issue not the actual Sagetv UI issue, if the video is in front of the options panel. Not sure. I tried your instructions with and without animations on with FSE and also tried with EVR/VMR9 combinations.

If you can think of anything I might be missing let me know and I'll try again.

PS - I am not sure that FSE is really needed, I've never turned it on in probably the last 5 years, most video cards don't seem to require it.

J

[TwistedMelon]

I never said anything about FSE... But I do actually have it turned on, mostly force of habit, dating back to when I used to use the server as a client from 2004 to 2008.

I'll see if there are any more details I can get to help replicate the issue.

There's no issue seen when running in windowed mode, and when the issue is present, it only seems to happen to the Options menu - or it may be that's the only one tall enough to see appear behind the video. In any case, nothing appears back there until that menu is called up at least once.

At the very least I'll try to get a couple of photos.

[jorton]

My mistake, I got confused by the capitalized "FULL SCREEN MODE", I never run in windowed mode on my HTPC at least.

Post some shots if you can, but if we can't duplicate it there's not much we can do about it to fix it.

J

[TwistedMelon]

More testing: It only happens with FSE on. As far as I'm concerned, unless you really want to go after this one, we can ignore it. If there's no benefit to running FSE, might as well turn it OFF after all.

[TwistedMelon]

Anyone else notice that when you get a new series in the recorded list and it doesn't have any associated Poster that it will show the poster of a previously displayed series in the list?

For instance, yesterday I recorded a Gordon Ramsey prison show on FoodTV which didn't bring in a cover (BMT downloaded one, but Gemstone didn't pick it up). So when scrolling through the list it picked up the cover of the item directly below it, Grimm.

Tested on both Extenders and PC-Clients.

I fixed it by going into Fan-art manager and setting the one and only BMT-downloaded poster as the default. But this only fixed it for the one extender I set it on, not on the other extender nor PC-Client. This part os something we've discussed before.