Some video files may exhibit a visual artifact known as "tearing" when playing back through MediaShout. If you're not familiar with this issue, it appears as a thin, horizontal line that may sporadically occur in a similar place on the screen -- though it doesn't always -- while video is playing. For a more detailed description of this issue, see this Wikipedia article. If you experience this issue when using version 4.5 under Windows 7, you will need to change a default setting in MediaShout and ensure that you haven't also disabled the required settings in Windows.
NOTE: This issue and solution only applies to Windows 7. If you are using Windows Vista you should not be experiencing this issue, so we do not recommend changing the settings below. If you are using Windows 8, this article does not apply because Aero was removed from that version of Windows.
Solution:
- In MediaShout, go to Tools > Settings... > Screens, then uncheck Disable Aero Glass under the Control Display settings.
- Ensure that you have not selected a desktop theme from the 'Basic and High Contrast' group under Personalization.
- Make sure that the following settings are enabled under Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced system settings > Advanced > Performance 'Settings...' button:
- Enable desktop composition
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons
(These settings are a good reference starting point. You can modify these to suit your own needs.)
More Information:
MediaShout has disabled Aero (or Aero Glass, as it was called in Vista) by default ever since we discovered that a bug in Vista's implementation would sometimes cause videos to play upside down and/or backward. It also can be a resource hog, so while it is switchable in the Screens settings in MediaShout, we've always defaulted to it being disabled.
Windows 7 uses Desktop Window Manager in a different way than Vista, however, and if you disable Aero applications can't take advantage of the double buffering and resulting vertical sync improvements that DWM offers. So you actually are causing worse playback when you think you are turning off what appears to be a resource hog! Many IT pros routinely set up systems with all the pretty user interface options turned off for that very reason.
Given this situation, if you are running Windows 7 and experience video tearing, we recommend following the instructions in this article to enable Aero. As was noted above, if you are running any other version of Windows this fix will not apply. We do recommend that you carefully select the settings that are available in the other versions of Windows to ensure maximum performance.
For more information on Desktop Window Manager see this Wikipedia article.