Miro

For newer hardware it might be better to use the latest LTSC version which is Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019. LTSB 2016 doesn't support DCH graphics drivers.

With windows 10 LTSC/LTSB you can simply disable automatic updates and get the updates you need from Microsoft Update Catalog. This allows you to download the updates on a different computer and transfer these to the offline server without the need of connecting the server to internet.

In some cases the GPU power management is a bit stupid. Some systems clocks down the video memory speed when the GPU load is low. Just playing video doesn't really utilize the GPU much but the video will start stutter if video memory is clocked down. Also the PCIe lane speed can be clocked down as well by the system. This can often be solved by a registry setting like: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000] "ForcePcieLinkSpeed"=dword:00000003 This assumes that your nvidia GPU is located at 0000. If the intel GPU is at 0000 and nvidia is at 0001 then just change this value instead: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001] "ForcePcieLinkSpeed"=dword:00000003 Also force the system to use the Nvidia GPU for WATCHOUT so it doesn't switch. Last, in the nvidia 3D settings change power management from "Optimal Power" to "Prefer maximum performance". Also setting Threaded Optimization to off might improve playback.

What about the power settings? It is set to maximum performance both in windows and the nvidia settings?

Hi, can you check if the desktop settings are matching the settings of your show when you are setting up the sync settings? The sync card is setup in desktop mode and if you go full screen with any other settings it will invalidate the sync. For example: 10bit 1920x1080 59.94 Hz in the desktop and running 8bit 1920x1080 60.00 Hz in WATCHOUT will not synchronize. 10 or 8 bit settings are set in the AMD control panel while resolution and refresh rate is set in Windows settings. You can check output signal details in the AMD control panel as well since that one will show the correct refresh rate. Windows is not consequent and is displaying 59 or 60 Hz in different places for 59.94 Hz signals. Also you can test if running eyefinity works. Eyefinity should always be in sync.

Ronald, we are using the radeon-pro-software-17.q4.1-whql-dec14 drivers. In the WATCHOUT installation folder you will find the following exe-files: WATCHPOINT.EXE (~879 KB) WP.EXE (~9.5 MB) The small one WATCHPOINT.EXE has a watchdog functionality. It launches WP.EXE and re-launches if it crashes or hangs. The problem in the 6.1.6 version is that the time-out for detecting if WP.EXE is unresponsive is 10 seconds. Creating many displays in Windows 10 takes time, especially if the driver needs to change display mode. Creating more than 3 displays takes more than 10 seconds which will result in that the watchdog terminates and relaunches WP.EXE infinitely. This has been addressed in later versions of WATCHOUT but in 6.1.6 it's not. What you can do is to skip the watchdog and run WP.EXE directly. Also setup the display settings to match your show for a quicker start. If you need the WATCHDOG functionality, Windows has some built in functionality for this using the task scheduler but I haven't tested it. There should also be plenty of 3rd party solutions for this. //Miro

It also depends on how you tweak your network adapter driver settings. Default settings are using pretty small buffers and jumbo frames are disabled. You need to change this for reaching actual 10 GbE. There is a trade-off between low latency and transfer speeds. Read the documentation from your hardware vendor. Intel has usually good guides on how to tune the adapter for maximum throughput.

It's too much junk and pop-ups on that page. If you get a printer error then the question is why are you installing printer drivers on a display server or production computer?

The -TimeOut command was added in 6.3 so it's pretty new. A simple test to determine if you need to use a extended timeout is when WP.exe starts without issues but WATCHPOINT.exe doesn't. WATCHPOINT.exe has a watchdog functionality and starts WP.exe and if WP.exe crashes or hangs (timeout), WATCHPOINT.exe will restart WP.exe. Therefore problems with infinite restarts are occurring if the window creation time is longer than the timeout. Running WP.exe directly isn't really recommended unless you are using any third part watchdog/safeguard application.

Are you using Win10 LTSC 2019 or LTSB 2016? With LTSB 2016 you need to install at least the kb4057142 update to resolve some Microsoft multi-monitor bugs. Most common problem is that the windows output timing is not the same as the one used in the show and that it simply take too long to apply all the changes when entering full screen. This triggers the timeout in WATCHOUT and the process starts over again. For example we have this issue in our lab where we run 6x 3840x2160 monitors that are 10-bits per color component. Before starting WATCHOUT the AMD settings must be changed from 10 bpc to 8 bpc for each monitor. Then it works just fine. Also make sure to use WATCHOUT 6.3.1 where the timeout has been extended from 10 secs to 60 secs. It's also possible to use a -TimeOut parameter in order to extend the timeout even further. For example: "WATCHPOINT.EXE -TimeOut 120" will result in a two minute timeout. Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 2.x is a lot slower to apply display changes than version 1.x used in Windows 7 & 8.

Misterk, Nvidia is usually less hassle and more consistent drivers. They follow standards more strictly which means that you need to manually override some display outputs to use full range instead of limited range over HDMI. Same setting needs to be set for video conversion to prevent live video to be in a limited range when converting YUV to RGB. Ortfisher, even if you can source drivers via Windows updates, a better way is to obtain drivers from each manufacturer directly. I always extract the core drivers from their software package in order to get rid of all other softwares that comes bundled with it. The risk of getting everything from Microsoft is that you may receive generic drivers that doesn't perform as well as the dedicated drivers.

All windows versions uses a different version of WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model). Windows 7 uses WDDM 1.1 and Windows LTSB uses WDDM 2.1. There are major differences on how fullscreen windows are created between the major versions of WDDM (1 & 2). It simply takes longer for Windows 10 to initiate and create fullscreen windows. We made some improvements for this in WATCHOUT 6.3 in order to speed up the process and create all fullscreen windows at once. Display driver version has also a big impact and for AMD the only driver that works well with WDDM 2.1 & 2.2 is the 17q4.1 enterprise driver. Most tested drivers from AMD released in 2018 has various problems, where most of them result in poor HAP playback performance. Some AMD drivers from 2018 might also bluescreen at windows logon if they are forced to run at maximum clock speed using the registry.

Hi, WATCHOUT doesn't really add any latency. However, latency might come from the interface between WATCHOUT and the hardware. An application can either use BlackMagic's proprietary framework/API Decklink or DirectShow. WATCHOUT only supports DirectShow so when you are comparing software then make sure that you are comparing using the same framework. WATCHOUT is pulling the frames from the DirectShow capture filter as fast as possible. The BlackMagic DirectShow capture filter is installed when installing the software package from BlackMagic so it might be good to test different versions of their software. Another good test is to install the 32-bit version of Media Player Classic Home Cinema because it uses pretty much the identical DirectShow filter graph as WATCHOUT. What normally adds latency is re-sampling of any kind like color format re-sampling, color space re-sampling, framerate re-sampling or resolution re-sampling. Especially if the hardware doesn't have these capabilities then the conversion takes place in software. WATCHOUT is capturing using the YUV 4:2:2 8-bit (YUV2) format in the resolution and refresh rate that is specified in WATCHOUT for the live video media. Getting the frame from DirectShow and showing it on the screen takes usually two display frames due to double buffering. So if you are running the displays at 60 Hz then WATCHOUT will add around 33 ms. All other latency comes from the DirectShow capture filter and capture hardware. Most hi-end hardware adds around one frame when not re-sampling etc.. So in most cases it should take 3-4 frames from capture to display. Some hardware have low latency modes which makes it possible to capture in less than one frame time (example: Datapath livestream) which results in a 2-3 frames capture to display latency. Blackmagic's DirectShow implementation isn't the greatest and you need to make sure that no re sampling is taking place for best results. Test Media Player Classic with the same settings as in WATCHOUT and see if you get the same results there. Make sure to select the YUV2 color format when comparing. Best Regards, Miro

It depends on your version of windows. In most cases 64-bit windows is used.