Sound crackling while playing back anything - every 5 seconds

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?

With the new 1.0.1 MP release, I get a short crackling sound while playing
back anything as long as Moving Pictures is enabled in MP Configuration.
Tested while playing back Music (MP3, Flac) from local drives as well as
windows shares. Also happens while playing back series (xvid, x264 - using
MP TVSeries) and other Video files (using My Videos) and Movies (using
Moving Pictures). The crackling is harder to notice while playing back
videos, but once you know it's there, it's well hear-able. It happens
exactly every 5 seconds with deadly precision. It's hearable in everything
I play. Disabling Moving Pictures in MP Configuration, or removing the DLL
from the plugins/Windows folder will solve the problem and make the
crackling sounds disappear. Tested with a clean 1.0.1 MP install, default
skins, no plugins except Moving Pictures installed, no Movie folders
assigned, no movies imported (empty database).

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

I'd expect no crackling sounds obviously. No idea why moving pictures seems
to have an influence on everything played back. I did not have this in
1.0.0 and also not in the first SVN versions for 1.0.1. Started with MP SVN
somewhere end of february - can try to find the exact MP SVN release if
necessary.

What version of Moving Pictures are you using? What version of MediaPortal?
What Skin?

Moving Pictures 0.7.2
MP 1.0.1 (clean installation setup only for testing this issue)
Blue3wide default skin

Please attach a screenshot and logs if possible. When submitting log files
please submit DEBUG logs.

Debug logs attached, although nothing suspicious seems to be in there.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by And.Lind...@googlemail.com on 13 Apr 2009 at 6:46

Attachments:

• movingpictures.zip

[GoogleCodeExporter]

And.Lindemann, I am sorry for the slow response. I am not sure this is an issue 
with 
Moving Pictures though. :/ I think the fact that the issue showed up when you 
upgraded to 1.0.1 indicates it might be a problem with one of your codecs that 
got 
changed with the upgrade? I am not sure. If we get more reports of this we will 
spend 
a little time on this, but I am not sure that much can be done on our end. We 
do not 
interact at all with any audio hardware or even directx, so I think this might 
be an 
issue with your system settings...

It has been a few weeks since you reported this, have you come up with a 
resolution 
in the meantime?

Original comment by conrad.john on 26 Apr 2009 at 11:27

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi,
sadly I've not yet made any progress here. I'm still only experiencing the 
problems
if Moving Pictures is active. Other plugins will not cause this behaviour, so 
in some
way it needs to be related, as I can play back the same content using standard
Mediaportal functionality (e.g. My Videos) without any problem, but only if 
Moving
Pictures is disabled. Enabling it will cause the sound issues.
As the sound crackling occurs exactly every 5 seconds, do you have any idea if
there's something that moving pictures would perform every 5 seconds, maybe 
something
with the directory watching threads or so?

I'll try to narrow this down to the MP 1.0.0 SVN where this occured first, 
maybe we
can correlate this with changes done to MP that may have an effect on Moving 
Pictures.

Original comment by And.Lind...@googlemail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 4:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Btw, I don't think this is codec related, as it happens with everything I play 
back
(MP3, x264, xvid, mov - and there's different codecs involved everytime, 
checked the
graph). Also, if it would be codec related, disabling/enabling moving pictures 
would
certainly not cause the issue to appear/disappear, as I don't think moving 
pictures
messes around with the codecs if it's not even used to play back the content.

Original comment by And.Lind...@googlemail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 4:30

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Now, that was rather quick testing. Unfortunately, the results are somewhat
disappointing.

What I did was:

- Installed MP 1.0 from here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=107397&filename=MediaPor
tal_1.0_Setup.exe&a=50345229
- Installed Moving Pictures 0.7.2 (from zip, without installer)

I did not add any folders to Moving Pictures, so the movie database is empty.
There is also no skin and no other plugins installed.
I also did not configure any special things (codecs etc) in Mediaportal, as I'm 
going
to perform the tests with simple MP3 audio playback using the standard "My 
Music"
screens.
The MP3 file used for testing resides on the local hard drive, so there's no 
network
involved.

Test results:
Clean MP 1.0/MovPic 0.7.2 installation
Moving Pictures disabled: No issues
Moving Pictures enabled: regular crackling sounds during MP3 playback

To make sure this is not related to the MP3 codec, I used a FLAC audio sample, 
giving
the same results.
The crackling is really subtle and somewhat unnoticable if you just "listen" to 
the
audio and is barely noticable in movies at all. However, once you really pay
attention to the sound, it's absolutely obvious and annoying.
It's even a lot more obvious in my MP 1.1 installation with a number of movies
imported, so that's probably why I did not notice it in MP 1.0 before, but it's
definitely there as well. So it's not related to the MP update at all.

As I was somewhat disappointed of this, I started trying older versions of 
moving
pictures, to see if I could figure out when the problem started and I found it 
really
quick.
It's 0.7.0 where the issue first occurs. Moving Pictures 0.6.6 is fine and does 
not
hurt my audio playback at all. That doesn't seem like a big surprise, as 0.7.0
introduced quite a lot of changes as far as I can tell, so it'll be difficult to
determine what could be the cause.

The other thing, why you probably don't have many users complaining about this 
issue
is, from noticing sound hickups in your audio files to the idea of debugging it 
by
disabling the moving pictures plugin is a very long way. I'm somewhat used to
debugging and tracking problems, as it's part of my daily work, but the 
ordinary user
will probably never get the idea, that moving pictures could cause audio 
hickups. I
mean, I'm still the only one here who's fairly convinced that this is the case, 
am I
not? :-)
But unfortunately, the test results here really show that there's something in 
moving
pictures that's causing this. Although I've no idea of how to track this down 
even
further.

Original comment by And.Lind...@googlemail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 5:22

[GoogleCodeExporter]

well the drive check is every 5 seconds that would be my best bet for now... 
but then
again you are the first one reporting this sort of crackling. Maybe we can give 
you a
special dll in which this is turned off (in turn disabling the import/watch 
detection
in some degree) to see if it solves your problem.

Original comment by apond...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 5:38

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What is your forum name And? We are planning on releasing a 0.7.3 build in the 
next day 
or two and I can send you an alpha tonight that allows you to disable the disk 
checks 
(which occur every five seconds). This would mean a loss of some functionality 
such as 
DVD insertion behavior, but it may fix your audio problem.

Honestly though this sounds like a system issue to me. Because all the process 
is doing 
is querying your optical drives every 5 seconds to check if a disk has been 
inserted. 
This should not normally have any affect on audio...

Original comment by conrad.john on 27 Apr 2009 at 6:14

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for providing the alpha. Disabling the Disk Monitor fixes the sound 
issue for
me. I'll probably still take a shot at figuring out if it's in some way related 
to my
system. I don't need the functionality that the disk monitor provides, so 
disabling
it won't really be a problem for me at the moment.

Original comment by And.Lind...@googlemail.com on 28 Apr 2009 at 3:57

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fantastic, glad the sound issue is fixed for you. I think in the future if we 
have 
additional people complain about this we will reopen it to see if there is 
anything we 
can do to address the issue while maintaining the functionality of the Device 
Monitor. 
For now though I am going to go ahead and close this.

Original comment by conrad.john on 28 Apr 2009 at 4:13

• Changed state: FixedCompleted