Disabling Hardware Acceleration within Windows
On Windows if you are experiencing issues related to videos freezing or very high memory usage then disabling hardware acceleration may help.
Proclaim uses Windows Media Player to play videos on PCs running Windows. There is an issue with some versions of Windows Media Player using certain display drivers that can result in videos freezing when loading or within the first couple seconds and very high Proclaim memory usage. Continued use of Proclaim experiencing this often results in Proclaim running out of memory and crashing. Disabling hardware acceleration often resolves this issue.
Disabling hardware acceleration may decrease the overall performance of Proclaim and should not be done on machines not experiencing this issue. Before disabling hardware acceleration you should ensure your video drivers are up to date using both Windows Update and checking the computer or video card manufacturer's site for updates.
By default hardware acceleration is enabled. Disabling hardware acceleration is a per-machine setting. If you re-install Proclaim or go to a different machine this setting will not be applied to that instance of Proclaim.
How to disable hardware acceleration within Windows
- When starting Proclaim hold the Control (Ctrl) key down. This will bring up the Sign in screen.
- On the Sign in screen check Disable hardware acceleration and then Sign in.
How to enable hardware acceleration within Windows
- When starting Proclaim hold the Control (Ctrl) key down. This will bring up the Sign in screen.
- On the Sign in screen uncheck Disable hardware acceleration and then Sign in.
Comments
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Nick - I have experienced this very issue with Proclaim. I did not realize the crashing was coming from this source, but this has been my problem. The motion video backgrounds freeze after just a few seconds, and then they won't move anymore. Then, after a bit, Proclaim crashes.
After reading this, I updated my Geforce 670 driver to the latest, double checked that all other Windows stuff was updated, then tried again. Same problem. If anything, the crashing happened more quickly.
I did try disabling the hardware acceleration, and the motion videos would play, but it made the transitions between slides so choppy that it was not really a solution.
I have a stout system used for video editing, so I don't believe that a lack of hardware is my issue. Below is my system,with a Geforce 670 GPU.
I really would like to use motion backgrounds for what I am doing. It is disappointing that I can't seem to use them.
But aside from that, I really do love this program and the integration with Logos.
One other question. Is there a way to disable the timer on the logo screen?
Thank You
Jim Clay
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Hi Jim,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. We have been working on this but, I am disappointed to report, do not yet have a solution.
We have found that this happens much more frequently on Windows 7 (vs Win 8.1). If you have another machine - do you see this happening on all of them?
With hardware acceleration off the transitions are forced to be done by the CPU. This can be slower - particularly if your CPU is working hard already. Do you have other applications running at the same time? Does Windows Task Manager show high CPU usage? If you disable transitions (or use a different one) does performance improve?
Thanks,
Nick
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Nick.
It seems to not happen on another windows 7 computer I use for presentation. I did try different transitions and disabling the transitions. It did not improve the choppiness.
I have not noticed high CPU usage. After I read your initial post, I looked for that, but didn't notice any particularly high usage. Maybe I should try again and look more closely.
I have plenty of system to handle other applications, but even when I am just using proclaim, with nothing else, the same problem happens.
I would really appreciate any more help on this. I really would like to get this solved so I can do some of the things I am trying to do with proclaim.
Thanks for replying.
Jim Clay
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I have been having this exact same issue on my system with similar stats but it happens even with short videos. I can see the video loading into memory in the task manager but it does not play, at this point I see the CPU usage hit 25% and stays steady. When it loads the next video you can see the memory usage spike and does not go down. This will continue until the memory usage reaches multiple gigs.
When I close proclaim the program will close but the process is still running and will have to be force close with the task manager before it will allow me to open it again.
Disabling Hardware Acceleration makes the videos skip really bad so it does not work for us at all.
We are using an NVIDIA 560ti It only happens On Air and never in the preview. Sometimes it happens using motion backgrounds and sometimes when playing regular videos like our welcome videos.
Please help.
Daniel Smith
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I'm experiencing the same issues at the other users, but I found an interesting workaround.
We recently upgraded our pc in the soundbooth, Intel i5, 8 gigs of ram, Nvidia GTX 750, not a slow machine. While testing this in my house, I connected it to my three desktop monitors (the same number of outputs we use at the church). 2 of these outputs were HDMI, and the third was a DVI output that used a conversion cable to make the output HDMI. Basically saying, it was 3 pure digital displays.
Proclaim ran absolutely flawlessly. We'd had this stuttering issue before, so we wondered if it was just hardware. I jumped through slides as fast as possible, not one video hesitated to play or stuttered at all. Going in and out of On Air quickly had no problems, nothing could slow this thing down. We thought everything was fine, until we plugged it in at the church,
At church, the stuttering returned and we had to disable hardware acceleration. Then I realized that our projector is a VGA cable. Something about using an analog signal causes the hangup. I unplugged the projector and plugged in an HDMI monitor: It ran perfectly. So for now, the only workaround I can find is using a digital signal to send to a projector. Easier said than done. We purchased a simple Extender that uses network cables and we are going to send an HDMI cable to the projector. I will update with results after we install the cable.
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Aaron - I wanted to check in to see how your experiment went? Did replacing the VGA output with HDMI fix the stutter issue?
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I have only seen help with this problem on PCs, but we are only using Proclaim on Apple products (iMac and Macbook). The video backgrounds are slowing the program down some badly that it nearly freezes the program. This has only been the case since the last 2 or 3 updates. Last night during our service, our tech guy had to restart Proclaim twice because it lagged so badly. Let me know what we need to do, or if there is an update coming to fix this. In the meantime, will it help to just use still backgrounds? It is more important for the program to run smoothly than to have video backgrounds. Any help and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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I'm sorry that you are having issues. Do you know what versions of OS X you are using on your computers? That may help us track this down.
Mac | iOS | Android | Windows | Web Developer
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I would like to know if this works too as the update didn't work and disabling hardware acceleration made the transitions choppy.
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Interestingly, no it did not work. The HDMI cable we are using is a repeater
https://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=109&cp_id=10110&cs_id=1011012&p_id=8121&seq=1&format=2
that uses 2 Cat6 cables to run a long HDMI signal. The cable works fine and can send full 1080 resolution at 100 feet, and the computer recognizes it as HDMI. I couldn't replicate the results I was seeing while building the pc. There are currently 3 video outputs from that computer, all digital, in the same configuration that I had while the computer was being built. I specifically stress tested proclaim with hardware acceleration enabled to see if that was the issue, and it didn't show one sign of stuttering or freezing then.
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Hello, earlier in our service I noticed our motion loops weren't working and our preview box was not working also (it had a blank screen). I tried re-uploading a motion and the background of the song turned white and flickered until it showed the motion loop but it still didn't play. Do you think disabling the hardware acceleration will help with the motion loops? And as far as the preview box not working, have you heard of this before?
Gil De La Rosa
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G DLR said:
Hello, earlier in our service I noticed our motion loops weren't working and our preview box was not working also (it had a blank screen). I tried re-uploading a motion and the background of the song turned white and flickered until it showed the motion loop but it still didn't play. Do you think disabling the hardware acceleration will help with the motion loops? And as far as the preview box not working, have you heard of this before?
Gil De La Rosa
First, make sure that your video drivers are up to date. If you still experience issues I recommend disabling hardware acceleration like this thread outlines. If you don't experience the video issues then you know it's a video driver issue.
Posting your video card info as this article describes will help us diagnose further as well.
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