WindowBlinds and Video OVERLAYS Render conflicts

I believe we have the same problem.  When I open a movie in Cyberlink PowerDVD 5 I have a black box in the middle of the screen.  Nothing I have tried removes the box including a reinstall of the player.  Other players have zero problems such as VLC player and MS Player. 

I also noticed something weird.  If I open Powerdvd player first then browse for a movie to open I get the black box.  However, if I double click on a movie file the movie will play fine in Powerdvd.

Any ideas on what the problem could be with Powerdvd?

The fact it acts differently when it is maximized seems to be useful information.

I hope to have positive news (for at least some overlay apps) soon.

Hi Neil, I assume you work for Stardock from your various posts.  Anyway, to clarify something you said.  I do not notice any difference when the program is maximized or minimized or any size in between.  For me at least, it does not matter what size the powerdvd window size is.  What I was trying to say was it acted differently depending on how the program was opened.  For example, if I open powerdvd first then browse to the movie file I get a black box.  However, if I double click on a movie file, which then opens powerdvd, it plays fine. 

Hope that helps and sorry for my poor initial explanation!

Also worth mentioning is that powerdvd works fine on my laptop and not on my desktop (as discussed in another thread here on the forum).  All the software is the same except I have XP Pro SP1 on my laptop and SP2 on my desktop.  Since I have alot of important work documents on my laptop I have been hesitant to upgrade to SP2 on it.  Next week after I do my weekly hard drive backup, I will try to upgrade to SP2 and see what happens.  Therefore, the main differences are hardware, hardware drivers, and XP Pro SP1 versus XP Pro SP2.  Hope that also helps!

Hi, cajunjunky & Neil:

Thanks for your replay.

In my case:

1. Any other maximized window ( explorer, IE or any other ) will cause the overlays problem. When I change the display mode from normal to fullscreen, or reversely, it can be correct. But in some media player, it doesn't work to change the display mode.

2. To cajunjunky: I think we have the same problem with different appearances. Some media players behave just like you said. I think it relates to the methods of different media players how to initialize (or how often to reset) the overlays render. VMR or sofware accelerate mode will not cause this problem, and maybe the difference between your systems is not the point of this problem. I'v adjusted my media players to VMR mode temporarily to avoid this problem.

3. To Neil: Here's a Very Important information: I'v done some tests. I opened a normal explorer window on the desktop, as usual it didn't cause the overlays problem. But when I put it's window frame outside the screen, just a little, it caused the overlays problem just as a maximized window. I'v done more times, and found that if I move both the left & top borders out of screen, it will cause this problem. A single outside border or other sets of outside borders did NOT cause the problem. (The sets of outside borders include double, triple and full sets of borders. In the double sets of borders, only the top-left caused the problem. In the triple sets, the top-left-bottom and top-left-right caused the problem. The four outside borders caused the problem.)

BTW: Nvidia 5200 display card with 81.98 WQHL driver.

Any update for this issue?
I also have the same problem, when I applied some theme (interestingly, not all theme have this problem), some video players like nero showtime can't show full screen. When I changed some video overlay setting, it solved this problem in that player, but I don't know how to change overlay setting for every other players. I wonder whether this is a problem in such players or windowblinds 5. If you want detailed computer information, plz let me know how to get such info, I will add it.

P.S. - At least, iFlex doesn't have this problem, but when I applied new Thallo WB theme (By Kol), this problem happened.

The latest beta build of WB on OD has a workaround for those apps which have the buggy overlay setup code.

I see, it's nice to know stardock is working on this issue. Thank you very much, Neil.

This seems to happen as well , even when using the Luna Skin

I had a similar problem today after changing WB skins a few times, especially some Vista ones.  Also, had WB lock up at Please Wait dialog, and another time when hitting OK on Display Properties dialog.  So I re-started Explorer, and had problems playing WinDVD in fullscreen mode.  I didn't test to see if it was related to having off-screen transparent bits.  But a reboot helped and so it was...

Also, am having trouble with AveDesk gadgets leaving all sorts of junk on screen and having to shutdown and restart that and WB to get that fixed.  This stuff is definitely on bleeding edge and I'm surprised since there's a shareware fee to get full functionality (which I paid gladly).

-Naseer

I have the same problem, annoying as hell. I found that PowerDVD and Object Dock also cause all kinds of problems. Somewhat annoying that I have to close OD everytime I want to watch a movie.

I have a similar problem. Both the win32 port of MPlayer (www.mplayerhq.hu) and WinDVD 4 show a black video window when using overlay. Fullscreen mode works in both cases, though.

I use the latest WB-Beta dated 2006/02/10 and a "per-pixel" skin with transparent titlebars. Graphics chip: NVidia GeForce4 420 Go, ForceWare 71.89

The latest WB beta should be working ok with those apps.  I assume you have not excluded them from WB as if they are excluded then WB will not be applying the bug fix to them.

Thanks for your quick response!

The latest WB beta should be working ok with those apps. I assume you have not excluded them from WB as if they are excluded then WB will not be applying the bug fix to them.

Yes, I have not excluded MPlayer or WinDVD from WB. I assume, I use the latest WB Beta - Stardock Central shows Version 5.00b[b].002 as installed.

With WB loaded, WinDVD only works in window mode with all hardware acceleration disabled. MPlayer only works in window mode with all DirectX acceleration disabled. But both apps need much more CPU resources in these modes, so it would be great, if they would work with WB active as well as without.

There was a recent update to Object Dock , while it says it only had 2 fixes, It solved the TV Tuner issue for me......................... Full Screen works now without having to shut down Object Dock. Call it weird, call it mysterious , but everything works properly on my machine now.

There was a recent update to Object Dock

Really? How recent, and which version is it now please?

Are you sure the ObjectDock update fixed it, and not the WB update?

The WB beta on OD has a workaround for those apps (its not WB at fault here I should stress)

(its not WB at fault here I should stress)

I bet JRSCCivic98 would beg to differ....WB also brings on the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse in it's freetime....

I bet JRSCCivic98 would beg to differ....

A work around would going to "per application" under window blinds and adding an app (any and all of your conflicting video players) from there I checked "only skin this applications title bar" which is at very bottom of options. Now you can set your overlay options back to default so your videos don't look so poopy.

Totally excluding the app would be more likely to cause overlay issues as WB will not be applying the fix for the broken logic in the overlay apps.

But your partial exclusion is unlikely to have any impact as that just stops WB from skinning controls in non themeaware apps.

Totally excluding the app would be more likely to cause overlay issues as WB will not be applying the fix for the broken logic in the overlay apps. But your partial exclusion is unlikely to have any impact as that just stops WB from skinning controls in non themeaware apps.

In my case, this problem is not caused by the player window but all the window(s) which top-left border out of desktop or maximized.

I analyzed the working method of the per-pixel skin with skinstudio, and noticed that the reason is Windowblinds draws the per-pixel border out of desktop at the top-left corner. And, when a window is maximized, even the Windowblinds DOES NOT discard or redraw the per-pixel border and the title bar, but simply cover the title bar with the maximized titlebar picture. That means some transparent pixels are drawing out of the top-left corner.

Whatever, the top-left corner is the first pixel that the display driver works with to draw every screen frames. It's hard to estimate what will happen, when a program draws a transparent pixel out of the top-left corner. But, it causes the overlays conflict, in Windowblinds.

Above issue is in my case.

The problem occurs due to a coding mistake in the overlay using apps.  The code they used worked fine on 9x, but has been breakable since Windows 2000 and it appears nobody has noticed.

Of course it will not be a problem on vista as I believe overlays are not supported all!

Are you sure the ObjectDock update fixed it, and not the WB update? The WB beta on OD has a workaround for those apps (its not WB at fault here I should stress)

Yes, Im positive. When I tried the new update that had a work around it still did this.

However , then when it said a new version of Object Dock was availible , I downloaded it , and now I can use my tv tuner in full screen without it blanking out.

Strange things happening here.

I have this same problem.....any video i try to play full screen come up black!

What ObjectDock version solved this for you? I will try to solve the problem with some of your suggestions.

-Adam

around March would be 1.3 I believe

latest version now is 1.5