choppy video playback after first video played

I also have this problem and it doesn't seem to be tied to the video size. I actually tested this with the original "Getting Started" file that comes with MS4 and found this to be the case. When I close MS4 and reopen it, then whatever video I choose first plays fine and then we repeat the issues above on video number 2 and beyond.

This is the very same issue I reported a few weeks ago. The issue went away as soon as I changed the display resolution to 1024x768. Since our new projectors use this resolution as their default it's not an issue...

Search for "Playback becomes jerky moving from one cue to another"

This actually didn't work for me. Same issue, even when the resolution is changed to 1024x768. Thanks!

At the risk of asking the obvious, did you close MediaShout (or at least the script) and then reopen it? I seem to recall having to do one or the other.

Yep...don't worry about the risk...we are all working together to solve the issues. Thanks!

I have less choppiness when at lower resolutions, but it is still present. The only time it is really not noticeable is when the resolution is set down to 800x600 with 16 bit color depth... not really acceptable quality compared to it running fine in MS3 with 1280x800 and 32 bit color. I guess I'm just waiting for the next update and having my fingers crossed real hard.

Yeah, Chris. I'm using 107.3 and I still have the problem. It may be the computer (I hope) and not MS, but I don't have our other gear available to test with at this point. Still using 3.5 on our main gear and don't want to upgrade until I am confident with v4. Thanks!

yes, it is still present for me as well

My problem with video playback sounds the same except it happened from the first video played. My display settings are 1024X768 at highest bit. In the small preview box on the video insert the clip plays fine. But when played it's completely off with the sound coming before the action or mouth moving. My cursor is also jumpy on this too. Desperately need some ideas of a fix as I need to run some video next weekend at a men's retreat. Thanks everyone - good community support here.

i've also noticed that it has problems immediately when on a single display using the video overlay mode. it is sluggishly playing the video and the cursor stutters. after exiting the overlay mode everything goes back to normal. again, this is when running media shout specifically in single dispay.

I'm having the same issue; the preview window is fine, but trying to project with a motion background cause the machine to behave as though the CPU is at 100% but it's not. Jerky video, mouse movement, slow to respond, etc. We have three outputs connected to an operator monitor and two projectors. Each of the projector displays is set to 1024x768.

I had to set the resolution to 800 X 600 to make the videos play correctly. If there is something else going on on the computer, like if I open a window to quickly add a graphic or something then the video is choppy again. Idealy we need to use 1024 X 768, or 1280 X 1024 for the projectors.

Y'all are scaring me. We have not upgraded yet but are having issues with playback in MS3. BLEH!

I have the same problem. Media Shout 3.5 does not function well using more then one video or motion background. Our design team plans each service and they are increasingly demanding more and more video, motion and or power point ability however, Media Shout just can't deliver

Latest build b112.1 still has this problem. In fact is is worse than the last build.

From the 'For What It's Worth Department':
Our new projection computer had this problem (new Dell, nice beefy machine). We purchased it with an NVIDIA dual video card to use with the vibook USB video adapter that came with the MediaShout bundle. Couldn't get the vibook to work, so our resident tech 'expert' purchased an ATI dual video card. We had all kinds of problems with it. We have now installed another dual NVIDIA card and everything is working like a charm. We run the operator console at 16-something by whatever, and the three projectors at 1024x78 and everything is smooth.

I still have some issues on the laptop I use for building the scripts but I can live with that.

Moral of our story: make it easy on yourself and get matching (or at least two from the same manufacturer) video cards.

I am having this problem as well. I have build 112.1. I have seen that a newer build is now available as of about 1 day ago, but have not tried it yet. I can drop the resolution of the projector to 800x600 and it plays fine, but anything above that it is choppy. The projector can handle more than that. I can play a movie on the projector with another program at 1440x900 and it plays fine. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance!

still present in build 115... any news from a MS person?

I have the same issue even with the NEWEST upgrade! choppy video playback. i am refusing to use version 4 when MS 3.5 is playing my videos fine. Videos are .wmv files created in Sony Vegas Movie Studio. They work perfectly MS 3.5, though.

I'm doing what Gregg is - using MS 3.5 because it works with video. Hate buying a product that can't be used.

I’m demoing MS 4.1 b 117.2 for purchase consideration and these video playback issues make me nervous about dropping good money on this product. I have a Dell laptop with Core Duo 1.8.Ghz and 3 gig’s system ram. Video is an Intel 256 mb card. I too can’t get the included tutorial to play properly. Not exactly the kind of first impression one would expect when testing a new product.

I've been havign this problem as well, even through build 118. On every video we play we have a background video and text overlay. While the slide is up the video display is choppy. As soon as I fire the next cue the video runs smoothly during the transition, then goes back to being choppy again. When I go to 800x600 it runs better, but the I still see a slight stutter in the mouse movement, and the video it still running a little slower while the cue it up, which is noticeable again because it speeds up when switching cues.

I've installed the K-Lite media codecs recommended by MediaShoult, but it still doesn't seem to be making a difference. I'm running Vista in high performance made with a 512MB Nvidia card, 1.5GB RAM and Intel 2.7 Ghz Hyperthreading processor. So, a little under powered, but it ran MS 3.5 videos without a problem.

I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been any real feedback or solutions recommended. Is the recommendation that we go back to 3.5 until some solutions are provided, or is this specific to some soecific manufacturers hardware component?

Thanks for everything, we've loved having MediaShout through the years.

I have a 2.4 Ghz Dual Core HP laptop with 512MB video and 4 Gigs of RAM and I too have the problems that everyone else here is mentioning. I'm demoing MS and the tutorial video kills the machine. I've installed the Klite codec as suggested to no avail. I like the product so far, but this video problem must be fixed before we pay that kind of money, since that is one of the reasons we wanted to us MS in the first place. Please fix soon, or we may have to look elsewhere...

DB: what resolution are you using? We recently built a new building and installed three projectors (I forget the make and model right now). We run them at 1024x768 (their native resolution) and MS 4 works like a champ. I use quite a few motion backgrounds, and our pastor uses video clips fairly frequently, and we don't have any problems.

We found trying to run the projectors at a higher resolution caused this problem, so we backed it down to 1024x768. Our main computer, though, runs at 1600xsomething and it displays the videos fine.

We've found that 1024x768 is satisfactory for our needs.

I'm having the same problem. We have a series of slides we run before service as people are coming in. Then we have praise and worship lyrics displayed for up to 4 songs. After that we run the announcements which I create with a combination of Digital Juice and Adobe Premiere Pro. The only way I can get the created video announcements to not stutter is to close down Media Shout 4 after the lyrics and get it quickly back up before the announcements are needed. If the pastor wants to show video during the sermon then I need to close Media Shout down again for each one or they'll stutter and the audio lags behind.

So in summary, if I do anything before running a video..the video lags...if I do anything after the video...it lags, even scripted slides which shouldn't take much in the way of resources to run. My evaluation runs out in 13 days. If a new build isn't out by then I'll have to recommend we not go with Media Shout.

Our AV computer is fully up to date with Microsoft updates and Nvidia drivers for the graphics card.

When a video starts it's a bit jittery, and I can't move the mouse (it'll skip around the screen). The system processes aren't maxing out, really they stay steady around 30% for MediaShout. When I go to the next slide it flows smoothly while transitioning text, then stutters again.

I've gone through a couple different options on our machines, running a basic Vista or Windows XP, running at 800x600 for the presentation display and both displays. I've also updated all of our nVidia drivers and ensured Directx is up to date.

From perusing some other threads, I noticed the system specs were upped a bit, now requiring 2GB RAM, at least a dual core processor and at least 128MB video ram. While we have 512 video RAM, the machines have 1GB and 1.5GB RAM and neither have dual core processors. I believe the specs were lower when we purchased MediaShout the day it was available.

At this point, we've decided that while 4 has some nice new features, we can't come up with a rationale to buy a new machine on top of the upgrade cost already spent for what amount to nice features. We've gone back to v3.5. and everything is working well. If we find the funds later to get a new machine, or as prices drop, we may look forward to purchasing a new system. But for now the video slowness is a deal-breaker as every song has a video background.

While i understand new versions add features, which increase system requirements, I wish I understood why the core functionality of MediaShout continues to require more processing power. I do recognize the great product that MS is, and we won't be leaving them anytime soon, but for a church with our limited technology budget, we'll have to remain a bit behind the curve for a bit longer.

I'm having the same problem. Noticed today while trying to fix the problem is that only the .wma file flicker and not the .mpg files. Although, mine is more of a "stuttering" problem with the sound playback on .wma files. Anyone, having that problem?

Glad to see a solution may be on the horizon. I have the same issues as described by everyone else - the chopy video, curser and sound - though it usually shows up on the 1st video. I have been using MS 3.5 till a solution is found - however last Sunday, I set up MS4 because all I had were several different PPT to sequence and stills. Until just before the service when a video needed to be inserted - but before I switched everything over to MS3.5 -- I thought I would give it another try on MS 4 - it didn't work ( I guess I was lookking for a miracle), but I noticed something when I switched back to MS 3.5 -- maybe this will be helpful - maybe not. I am not a computer geek or have any clue how software works -- I just use the tools to accomplish what I want to accomplish. If something breaks I call in someone 30 years younger and/ or a professional. So starting from the beginning... I am using windows XP, Lenovo laptop, with core 2 duo, 2.2 Ghz, NVIDIA geForce Go 7300, 2 gig ram

After booting up the laptop -- I right click and change the windows display property to extend the screen to the second monitor. Open MS 3.5. Fire a still and then a video everything works fine. On the MS 3.5 menu the 'screen' drop down shows the dual screen icon highlighted and the 'display on second monitor' checked.

Save this test file, close MS3.5 and open MS4 and open the 2 cue test file. On the lap top screen MS4 looks as you would expect -- fire the first cue ( a still frame), only the laptop's desktop shows on the big screen. Fire the video cue and it plays fine on the MS4 preview screens on the lap top.

Check the MS4 screen drop down menu and the 'display on second monitor' is checked, but the 'dual screen' icon is not highlighted. Click on the dual screen and now we are projecting on the big screen and video becomes choppy, sound is choppy and curser problems.

So why is the dual screen icon highlighted in MS3.5 and not 4? In addition - I think when I clicked on the dual screen setting in MS4 - the 'display on primary monitor' was suddenly checked as well. Not sure on this last point because it was a week ago.

Looking forward to a fix....

Just upgraded to the new build - still no improvement in video performance. In fact it may even be more choppy.

Staying with 3.5 for now.

Hate to say it, but I installed 125.3 on our production box at church, which has been fine playing videos with build 118, and the video playback immediately went choppy. I reverted to the system restore point to get back to 118 and it was fine.

Obviously not everyone must be having this problem? So - what is the difference between those that are and those that are not? If I have something set up wrong --I would like to know.

By the way - I tested the new build by hooking up the laptop to the TV. It works fine until you check the 'dual screen' icon to project onto the second monitor

The new build didnt help me either no matter what the resolution, My computer will play the videos fine when i switch to "Display on Primary Monitor" and have the script on my secondary, but motion BGs are still choppy only when there is text on the foreground. its only a pseudo fix beacuse now we cant edit anything live outside of Mediashout...

So can it be any of my computers specs/ settings then if when i swapped which monitors were primary and secondary and switched to "Display on Primary Monitor" video playback works???

I am running XP and all of my computer's spec's either match or exceed the computer requirements for V4 and my built-in video card is an ATI Radeon 3100 and i do have a NVIDIA GeForce MX 4000 that is disabled for now to use as the Stage display...

This issue was reported 4 months ago and we were told that this is the stuff that would be focused on in this new release, but 4 months later all we have is 1/5 th of the issue resolved does that mean we need another year before the rest of the issue is resolved?

Brad's solution got me on the track to solving my issue - on my lap top.

I uninstalled as directed - then went to the NVIDIA website for a new driver. That site suggested I download from Lenovo - which I did.

After installing this driver the video choppiness was gone - even after 3 consecutive video cues -- BUT - the audio was now out of synch.

When I purchased my lap top from my local comp store - the owner used Media Shout at his church and I told him to up grade the video card, driver and whatever else I needed to make the lap top work.

So - I am guessing ( my speciality is dairy farming) that the Lenovo drivers did not completely match the upgrade NVIDIA card.

Sure enough - I went back to the NVIDIA website, downloaded and installed the latest driver and all problems have disappeared.

Thanks for the help - at least you have one success in this thread.

Uninstalling and reinstalling fixed it 98% the mouse is still a little slow which we can live with my only issue is that when i use a motion background under a song the screen flashes black for a split second then does the transition but it doesnt do it every time... it isnt a huge issue for us, motion BGs are not a huge priority for us, im just glad that we can now use videos and DVDs... i am so glad that we're making progress...

anyone know why it flashes black before a text transition?? the BG is the same through the song and the transition speed doesnt seem to matter, and my screen res is 1024x768.....

Alright...I have never had this problem w/ MS in the past. I have used 2.5 and 3.0 and 3.5 and this is the 1st time I have had choppy video. Of all times, our Kids Church service was literally shut down. All of my praise and worship was video driven and would not play. I had to throw in the DVD and run it through a separate player to get praise and worship accomplished. I was dumbfounded thinking my video card was the issue.
I will research tomorrow my settings and update this thread.
I had no prob's w/ choppiness and skipping until I installed 125.3 build and now no vid's play properly. I have a NVidia video card and have never had issues.
PLEASE HELP! It was my suggestion to get the church to drop the $$$ to upgrade! Not that I am worried about my position, but I need to ensure we can resolve this FAST. We begin a brand new VIDEO-DRIVEN curriculum in a week! HELP PLEASE :(

We were on MS 3.5 Express. I will probably see if we can revert to the full 3.5 if possible. We'll see what MS says in the AM.

Jonathan: with all due respect, why did you not test it before your service? Assuming you're running at least WinXP, set a restore point before installing any update (although MS also does this, it never hurts to be sure). If the update gives you any problems, restore your system back to before the update.

I have done this as a matter of course with all the updates; saved me a last week!

I agree...However, if there was never any background that such a problem existed, I had no way of knowing after having used MS for about 5 yrs now and never seeing such symptoms. That being said, I am not well educated and will be working to try and restore tomorrow to get the system functional tomorrow.
As well, previous to the update, I had white flashes at the beginning of all vids...As well, to note: I installed on 3 other computers and all of which run ok....just this computer. As well, when I installed I tested some and didn't notice the dragging. It was when I came back for service that I caught the problem at hand.

With all due respect, it still wrankles me that the best advice to churches that popped 200+ bucks on an "upgrade" is to roll back to what you were using prior to laying out the cash. I believe MS is a great program and has done much to further the kingdom. But I for one have other responsibilities throughout the week and chasing down codecs and updated drivers all day Saturday is not the kind of activity that prepares me for a day of worship. I understand that MS is trying hard to fix problems, and I understand that there are infinite combinations of hardware and codecs and drivers. (That's why I'm a Mac guy!) I feel your pain, Jonathan. One of our first Sundays with the upgrade was a 40 minute video as part of the One Prayer campaign. I was literally sick to my stomach wondering if MS was gonna crash and burn. Seems to me that PowerPoint puts words and graphics on the screen. If MS can't at least play a video, what's the point?

I agree with the perspective that if MS can't play video, what is the point. I am going to revert back to powerpoint or easy worship until MS gets there act together. My experience has been brutal. Tons of wasted time reinstalling and the worry about the program continually crashing.

The most recent update fixed opur issues here. Time for me to jump out of this discussion to put my inbox at ease.

Wow. I am amazed almost a month has gone by with no posts on this issue. Did the new build fix the issue for the people who were having the problem?

By profession, I am a retired computer systems analyst. I have had many years of experience designing, testing and supporting computer software and hardware for some of the largest universities and banks in the nation After following this MS 4 issue for several months, I decided to weigh in on the issue with some observations.

I think it is interesting only 23 people have reported having this problem. I don't know how many MS 4 users there are, but I would be amazed if this amounts to any significant % of the total users. That says to me the vast majority of users have not experienced this problem.

From a logical stand point one must ask what is the difference between the systems without the problem and those systems with the problem. Basically, either hardware or drivers. These are both items over which Media Complete has no control.

We might think a computer is a computer. Any one will work as well as the next. That is true for some simple software programs, but especially not true for programs which use a lot of video. Why do you think there are computers which cost $300 and others which cost $2,000? What is the difference in them? That's right, the quality of the components, the memory, the bus speeds, the hard drives, the video cards, etc.

My experience with many organizations and especially with churches has been they buy hardware as cheaply as possible. That may be fine if all you want to do is run simple software, but MS 4 is far from a simple program.

I expect Media Complete does a significant amount of testing on every new version of their software as well as on every software update. They are not going to release anything that they think could reflect poorly on them.

But Media Complete sells software to anyone. They make systems requirements recommendations, but they really have no control over what the customer actually uses. Nevertheless, MC is expected to make their software run on any PC. That is an unreasonable expectation!

I commend Media Complete on a very fine product. I also commend them for the effort they have made to assist customers. Most companies would have just told customers, "If you want the new capabilities, you need to upgrade to hardware which will allow the software to function properly."

If my comments have offended anyone, it was not my intention to do so.

BTW, I understand Media Complete can provide you with hardware which has been extensively tested and will perform well with MS 4.

I still have the problem on the laptop I use to build the scripts, and on the desktop machine that we use at church to project during the services. For that reason we are still on build 118 at church. I just installed build 128 on the laptop and it still has this issue. I have not installed 128 at church yet, but when I installed the last build (126? 127?) I immediately had issues. That's why I took it back to 118.

I have not reported this as I should have because frankly I've not been in a hurry to upgrade at church until they got the Stage View display issues fixed. From my initial testing it appears some of these have been fixed in the new build (although changing templates STILL corrupts the custom stage content when a stanza has multiple pages), so I will once again upgrade the system at church and see what happens.

We upgraded video drivers when we installed build 118. I guess we're going to have to do it again?

I do want to make take a second to add a comment on this.
We implemented MS 4 on a Dell XPS machine (powerful) and an Asus laptop (not so powerful) and from the first release of MS 4 everything (including video) ran fine, then as we got updated versions, the video issue started to happen, so with the latest version, what we ended up doing is uninstalling the original MS install and installing the new version, everything works fine.

We are live in both the Sanctuary and the FLC with MS 4 running from the above mentioned machines.

To comment on Ron Clark's response: you must have never been in support, people rarely come to support when they want to praise the product, but they do come when there are issues, that is why it is called support.
The comments posted all throughout this website are mainly for support, so I expect to see some dissatisfaction in the comments.

I do want to thank MC for sticking with us all and getting the issues resolved.

We are still experiencing this issue. I am hoping that 4.4 resolves the issue. I understand and appreciate the effort made by MS to resolve the issue. However, I feel like some of these kinks should have been worked thru prior to release. As well, we spent $700 for a product we cannot use on a week to week basis. I understand we have a few computers that are antiquated. However, even on our computers that adequately have the right spec's we have to have specific video cards and other sensitive spec's to be able to function MS4. At my previous church, we had the full version fo MS3 and never experienced these problems. My question is if we in fact cannot resolve the video skipping issues, can we get install for MS3? We originally purchased MS3 Express. However, I believe we will be able to run MS3 w/ no hitches. Is that possible until all of these issues are resolved and we can get spec's that take care of any hiccups MS4 has regarding our technology?

Is anyone having problems with MS4 just locking up? I just updated to build 131 (v4.3), which has resolved the video playback problem. Unfortunately I have gained a new problem with the program just freezing. The only way to resolve is to "hard-reboot" the computer. Hasn't happened in a service, but has happened quite a few times in setup.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Randy Jones
Word of Life Lexington, KY

We had the same issue spring up this week--totally out of the blue (right in the middle of services). We've been using MS for a while without issue. We did not make any changes in our system or upgrades to MS and the video capabilities just died, followed by the freezing (using video or not) that others have described. Between services I jumped on this thread to troubleshoot, followed the advice that some found successful, including the most recent updates--all to no avail. We HAVE to resolve this issue before Sunday because we are going to be utilizing video every week for the next several weeks. If there are any new solutions out there, please include them.

I continue to have this problem, even after installing the K-Lite Codecs (most recent version) with the new build. Thing that frustrates me the most is that the video works/worked fine in Build 118, but has not worked with the updates since then. I apply the new builds (after setting a restore point in Windows), the video playback is choppy. I restore my system and the video playback is fine. Problem is build 118 has other issues that are fixed in the later builds (like some of the Stage View issues).

No offense intended, John, but we all hear that we need to check for updated video drivers, and now we should get the old ones?

Just started a new thread on this topic, so please close it if you need too.

We are having the same problem. Video playback is great in all programs, except Media Shout. The whole reason for us to get Media Shout is to play back videos.

So any help you could give us would be great. I spent ~6 hours today looking though these forums, installing codecs, reinstalling codecs, installing/reinstalling video card drivers. I went as far as to get another video card and see if that works. All for nothing.

Using VLC, Quicktime, or MS Media Player all result in 0-10% CPU Utilization in Media Shout it's 70-80%. How come the large overhead?

Thanks

We are experiencing the same problem and just installed the latest update for MS4. We have an Nvidia Geforce 5200 video card with the latest drivers from the Nvidia website. All videos play just fine until opened in MS then they are choppy and out of sync. We have had this problem since upgrading to MS4 and have tried everything other than going back to 3.5. Beginning to grow weary of dealing with this problem

John Do you have a list of all the recommend video cards? Not just the mobile ones.

I'm new to this forum and pretty new to MediaShout. A little background to start. My church had been using MS 3.5 without any problems at all. We just upgraded to version 4 and found this problem just before a small evening service. We had to scramble and replace all backgrounds with motion just so we could get it to work. For us, the issue is when we use dual screen. If I turn it off, the background runs fine on the control screen. It's when we turn on the second screen that the problems start. I would define it as choppy or sluggish.

In addition to our church set up, I have this on my home PC and I just installed a second monitor. Same problem. I can't tell you what we use at church (not my job), but at home I'm running Dell Dimension 8400, pentium 4 with a Radeon x300 series 128 megabytes of memory.

What's so frustrating is that 3.5 works just fine.