zPlayer-mpv

[CYCho]

Dear @Shark007,
I disabled K-Lite and installed Icaros. And my program cannot get the properties (frame height, frame width, frame rate and total bitrate) of MKV files. I checked "Activate" option when installing it. Do I need to do something more to make it work?

Thanks and regards,
CYCho

[Shark007]

Being that MKV is covered by the default settings of Icaros, MKV properties should work, out of the box.

The attached image shows that the PROPERTIES are shown as ACTIVATED.

 

Edited July 4 by Shark007

[CYCho]

21 hours ago, Shark007 said:

MKV properties should work, out of the box.

I found that K-Lite Codec Pack and Icaros cannot coexist in one system. When I installed Icaros in another computer which does not have K-Lite, it worked.

[CYCho]

In over 5,500 lines of code there are many places where it can be optimized, improved or corrected. I need everyone's help to find such places. I uploaded the latest version in the first post above.

[CYCho]

I consider my migration to mpv is complete and will upload the latest version of zPlayer-mpv to the download section of this Forum.

Edited July 17 by CYCho

[CYCho]

Hi everyone!

In previous versions of zPlayer, playing 4K videos in windowed mode caused an issue where the playback would freeze after about 20 minutes if the video window was completely covered by another window. This was due to the Windows native haviour to suspend video rendering when it is occluded for certain period of time.

This version, uploaded in the first post, bypasses this Windows behaviour in 2 ways. The first is addition of --d3d11-flip=no in mpv command line. This prevents Windows from breaking the hardware acceleration pipeline when the window is hidden. The 2nd is setting the attribute of mpv video window, not AutoIt GUI, to DWMWA_EXCLUDED_FROM_PEEK mode, which takes effect when the video is in minimized state. The top window does not lose focus in either of the cases. These measures proved to be effective both in my desktop (AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon Vega Graphics) and laptop (Intel Core Ultra 7 with Intel Arc 140V GPU). I would appreciate it very much if the Forum members could let me know how zPlayer performs in minimized and hidden state in their devices, together with the names of CPU and GPU.

Thanks in advance.

Edited July 28 by CYCho

[CYCho]

Hi everyone,

I've come to realize that building a full-featured media player entirely on my own is too big of a project to tackle. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been struggling to find a reliable way to bypass Windows' native behavior, which freezes video playback when the window is minimized or occluded (hidden behind other windows) for a prolonged time. Once frozen, it is almost impossible to unfreeze it.

I tried several different approaches to "fool" Windows, such as periodically restoring the video to the foreground in a scaled-down size with near-transparent opacity. However, Windows is quite stubborn, and I couldn't find a way to make it not to freeze the video, and restore the video instantly when clicking its taskbar button.

Because of this, I decided on a different approach:

• When occluded/minimized: Set the mpv vid property to "no". (This stops video playback and plays audio track only.)
• When restored: Set the vid property back to "auto".

This method is actually perfect for saving CPU/GPU power. The only drawback is that, depending on the file resolution and hardware specs, it can take up to 2 seconds for the video to reappear.

I tested this setup on two different machines with a 4K 60fps video:

• 10-year-old Desktop: It took about 2 seconds to resume the video.
• Brand new Laptop: It took less than 0.5 second.

Lower resolution 2K videos resumed almost instantly on both machines. While it's not a flawless instant-resume, I think it’s a reasonable and practical workaround for now.

I wanted to share this experience with the community. If anyone has found a better way to handle window occlusion without freezing the video stream, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for reading.

The latest version of  zPlayer can be downloaded here.

 

---

 

Edited Saturday at 12:28 PM by CYCho