Tool for Drop Frames Monitoring

[TwoBeAss]

Hey there,

i am building a new Watchout-Server and i want to see whats the maximum possible playout capacity... I want to monitor if the movies or image sequences are playing fluently. Is it somehow possible to show the actual count of played frames, or is there another trick than the observation for stuttering playback...

Thanks a lot for your help,

TwoBeAss

[Thomas Leong]

I use my good ole eyes   

 

But if you want, you could try Fraps on the Display PC.

The fps overlay stays in a corner (limited to Output 1 from my trials) overlayed on top of the fullsceen display.

To log the fps, F11 to stop the Benchmark before you quit Display PC fullsceen mode so that the data logged will be written to some files in csv format in the Fraps\Benchmark folder. Remember it is F11 from the keyboard attached to the Display PC, not the keyboard attached to Production PC. You can change the default F11 key to some other key if you want.

 

I use OpenOffice to read the csv files. Maybe Microsoft Word can too (not tried).

 

MSI Afterburner has also been mentioned as being able to monitor fps. I tried but that did not work. Maybe did it wrong, but Fraps is much easier, and has less overheads.

 

Thomas

[Miro]

Hi,

 

Tools like fraps will give you the FPS count for the whole WATCHOUT application but that is not always that helpful. A video file frame can be dropped without affecting WATCHOUT's rendering frequency which makes this really hard to debug. Also gaming video cards are not as good as professional ones to synchronize against v-sync, which may result in tiny glitches looking like frame drops.

 

We are looking into how to add better logging and statistics in future versions of WATCHOUT but in the meanwhile there are no good ways of doing this. You could monitor CPU/GPU usage to give you some hints to see if you hit the ceiling but it will not detect specific dropped frames. I often add a frame number overlay in my test videos and than use a hi-speed camera (like an iPhone or GoPro capturing at 240Hz) to record a screen/projection. Then I can analyse the captured video to detect frame drops but this is really time consuming.

 

//Miro

[TwoBeAss]

Hi,

fraps is not the solution, there are stable 50hz for me, but some framedrops are definitly there...

i need to figure where they come from, and an overlay of the cpu/ram/hdd/gpu/whatever specs would be so great to find the bottleneck...

any other tools that were good for monitoring my playout machines ?

 

thanks for your answers...

[Thomas Leong]

Thanks for the clarification, Miro.

 

In case you are not aware, in vlc > Tools > Media Information > Statistics, it gives a count of frames dropped - does not state at which point in time though. Being GNU Licenced, it should be ok to look at its code without breaking copyright laws, to see if its methodology can help with your objective on "...how to add better logging and statistics in future versions of WATCHOUT..."?

 

Thomas

[Miro]

Hi again, I use open hardware monitor since it can provide info about CPU and GPU load and can be monitored remotely in a web browser. It can also log to csv files. It doesn't require installation and can run from a USB stick.

 

 

For more detailed GPU monitoring I use GPU-z which can log with 0.1 second precision to a log file which then can be parsed in for example excel. You will get a time stamp so data can be merged from both softwares in a single scatter plot.

 

Best Regards,

 

Miro