My screen flickers while running Aerial

[kkarhi]

Hi, I recently bought a new Dell XPS PC running Windows 11 to replace my old Dell Inspiron PC that runs Windows 10. I was looking for interesting screensavers and found Aerial so I downloaded it to C:\Windows\system32. It showed up in screensaver app so I was able to set it to run. I have ran it using the screensaver app, by double clicking the Aerial app, and by double clicking the video file. The results are the same in all cases. I noticed that about every 30 seconds the bottom part of the screen has a little hiccup which freezes that part of the screen and then the video overwrites that part making that part of the screen very messy. The height of the messed up screen varies and seems to be random. Here is a pic about the problem. You can see the top half of the picture being sharp, but the bottom half is all smeared:

I have checked with Dell support and I have their latest video drivers so it is not that. I ran the Dell diagnostics and they all passed. I also ran YouTube videos of 4K and 8K format and they show with no issues. So it seems to just be the Aerial videos that have the issue. I then ran the video on my old system with the same monitor (a 32" ASUS monitor) and again there was no issue there. When I ran the video using the Aerial application, the video was not full screen and it did have the issue, so it is not just in full screen mode. So the problem is specific to Windows 11, my NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti graphics, or Aerial video, or some combination. Questions: What is the format of the videos? Are there some other videos of that format that I could try?

I do not know the version number of the Aerial app, but it was created 2/4/2017, modified 5/14/2019, and its size is 537088 bytes. Let me know how I can get the version and I will send it. Cheers, Kari Karhi karhi@hotmail.com

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[kkarhi]

Here are a couple of tidbits for the puzzle. First, I originally used a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0 on my old computer. When I first started playing with Aerial, it refused to start. I eventually traced it to the mouse and bought a Logitech mouse instead. With the new mouse Aerial works fine (but with the issue). If I start Aerial with the Logitech mouse and then switch to the Microsoft one, Aerial continues to run. Puzzling, huh (unless you added code into the app: "a Microsoft mouse, pff" :) ). The other thing is that I yesterday downloaded Apple TV Windows app and watched a movie with it. No issue, it worked fine. It was not in full screen mode as my screen has a different form factor, but as I said earlier, starting Aerial with the Aerial app will run in partial screen and will show the issue.

[kkarhi]

I wonder if this known stutter issue is the same as mine, see https://aerialscreensaver.github.io/troubleshooting.html

Videos are stuttering: There are thread general causes of stuttering:

Streaming: We heavily recommend you cache your videos instead of streaming. Streaming performance may cause stuttering or hanging as this is not something that's officially supported by the servers. Starting with version 2.0.0, streaming has been removed from Aerial to avoid those issues.

You are not doing streaming, are you? If not, then this should not matter. If you are, is there a way I could cache the videos?

HDR playback: Playback of HDR videos may cause random stuttering on some Macs, this issue has been reported on Macs with AMD graphics, and 2015 and earlier Macs with Intel graphics. 4K playback may also cause stuttering on some machines, like MacBook Air.

This sounds promising, but I watched several full-screen HDR 4K and 8K YouTube videos and did not see the issue.

Background tasks: MacOS may start some background tasks while the screensaver is running (usually after a set amount of time, like 5 minutes). `mediaanalysisd` is known to cause issues on some machines with integrated graphics. You can find more information [on how to disable it here](https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/issues/882#issuecomment-552104067).

This could be it as well, as I am sure there are a lot of background tasks in Windows 11, but the stutter seems pretty regular, every 30 seconds or so.