Buggy Issues with Proclaim

Our AV technician bought a license for Proclaim at a conference recently and we are trying to use it for our Sunday worship gatherings. I really like the collaboration between me (the pastor) and the worship leader, and just being able to see everything before hand. I also like that people can run the presentation remotely, and the integration with Logos Bible Software and the FaithLife Study Bible Ap is very nice too.

Unfortunately, our maiden voyage with the software didn't go as smoothly as we need. Everything was fine during the collaboration phase, and we put out training information to follow along with the FaithLife study Bible, etc. But when we ran it during the service things got buggy. Some things didn't work on the big screens and TV outputs (like the count down timer) and near the end of the service the presentation was lagging pretty badly. The memory usage spiked, and I guess we should be happy that it did not crash.

I read that this is a known issue and caused by a conflict with display drivers or with some versions of Media Player, and the work around is to disable hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, disabling hardware acceleration results in poorer software performance generally. Which seems counter intuitive to correct poor software performance.

I don't know the specs, but we have quite beefy machines running the software in the sound booth. Hard to imagine that being the problem.

So, before we abandon ship on an otherwise cool platform, is there a fix to these issues in sight?

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Scott Alexander

Sorry to hear your initial experience didn't go well. The hardware acceleration issue is a workaround for crashing and freezing during video playback on some Windows systems. Did you experience any video playback freezing?

You mention memory usage spikes, how high? did memory usage stay up? Proclaim is a memory intensive application so spikes are expected.

Some things didn't work on the big screens and TV outputs (like the count down timer) and near the end of the service the presentation was lagging pretty badly.

Can you elaborate on what about the countdown clock didn't work? If explain the behavior you expected I can take a look at your presentation and try to diagnose. Also I'm interested in the setup you're using for presenting. We have seen various cable and converter configurations cause lag with Proclaim.

Brandon

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/748332#Comment_748332

Hello Scott,

I am the AV person at our church and can give you a rundown of what all went on with Sunday.

I monitored memory usage during the service and Proclaim expanded from 400 MB to roughly 4.5 gigs over the course of an hour. I would expect a spike in memory during usage, but it never dropped back down and just continued to gain more and more.

The countdown video would show the first frame of the video but would not advance past that. I just added a new countdown as well and can see the download progress up at the top and when the video was done downloading I tried to go on air with it and received the same issue. When the video was ready for automatic play on the scheduling it also showed the first frame and would not play past that. If I disable hardware acceleration, the video will play but it is very choppy and drops frames to about half rate. I have tried other videos with the same issue as well.

Once we started to remote control the presentation via the iPad everything was delayed. When I tried to advance a slide it would take a few seconds to actually load the slide between the click and the presentation. The on screen bible would also freeze on the title of the book and then all of a sudden catch up and rapidly move the transitions.

I honestly didn't even try motion backgrounds for our service either since we were already having issues.

I also tried to close Proclaim and the software stayed open in the system process and continued to gain RAM as if it was still running. I had to force quit it and reload it to make it work.

Our computer is not brand new, but should be above the requirements needed to run Proclaim. We are in the process of replacing the computer, but have not done so yet.

As far as display goes, we have dual 9500 GT video cards which do show their age, but seem to run everything else without issue and play HD video files without any lag. I have tried to play the video on our presentations screen that does run through a VGA splitter and I have also tried it directly over a DVI connection that does not run through the splitter. Both methods resulted in no video playback.

Component

Details

Subscore

Base score

Processor

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz

7.3

5.9

Determined by lowest subscore

Memory (RAM)

8.00 GB

7.6

Graphics

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT

6.5

Gaming graphics

4095 MB Total available graphics memory

6.5

Primary hard disk

251GB Free (596GB Total)

5.9

Windows 7 Professional

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/748778#Comment_748778

Hello Brandon,

Thanks for the detailed report. What you're describing sounds like a memory leak, likely related to the video driver, exacerbated by video playback. The embedded Windows Media Player gets into a corrupted state and leaks memory, on top of failing to play the videos. It's an issue that affects some Windows systems but we haven't been able to isolate it to a specific video driver combination. Disabling hardware acceleration as described here almost always resolves the issue but can result in poor performance. Some users have been able to install an updated driver from the manufacturer website and the issue goes away.

We're working on an alternative video playback method for Windows using DirectShow. I'd love to get a beta build running on your system and see what the results are.

In the meantime I recommend making sure your video drivers are up to date and if the issue persists try disabling hardware acceleration and see how the performance is. I wish I had a better answer for you but we're definitely working on it.

Brandon

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/749017#Comment_749017

I am ok with running a beta build. Let me know what I would need to do and we can go from there.

Thanks!

Daniel Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/749017#Comment_749017

I would like to try the beta as well as I have posted multiple times with this same issue. I would really appreciate it greatly.

Chapel AV

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/748778#Comment_748778

Hey Brandon - We've experienced the same things that you and your Pastor are describing for some time. One symptom is a large memory leak resulting in videos locking up completely. Disabling H/W acceleration does seem to fix the issue but results in completely unacceptable performance. Playback of video as well as any motion transitions and the like are choppy. Playing the same video using Windows Media Player or VLC is just fine.

Unfortunately, the developers of this package have gone "all-in" on blaming video drivers for a memory leak despite many of us repeatedly telling them that they are the only program having such issues. My understanding is that these guys natively develop on a Mac and Windows is the port. I think this is the real root of the issue. We feel we've given them PLENTY of time to address the issue since it's been going on for over a year. It's to the point where we're currently evaluating other options.

It's very unfortunate since the features of Proclaim (online, collaboration, etc) really make them stand out. But, unless it works flawlessly on Sunday morning (EVERY Sunday morning), it doesn't matter how good or how many cool features they offer. It's all about preparing for Sunday services...

Best of luck to you guys,

Keith

Brandon

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/750346#Comment_750346

I love the collaboration, but will have to dump it if we can't make it work right.

Out of curiosity, I ran SongShow Plus next to Proclaim and it tore through HD Video and never climbed over 350 MB or RAM even with 720p videos running.

Not sure what it uses for video playback, but it has been rock solid.

Right now we use Proclaim to loop announcements, then close it and use SongShow for singing and then switch back to Proclaim for sermons, and back to SongShow for a final song if we have one. I close Proclaim and on our system usually have to force quit to clear the memory usage for the next go round.

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/750489#Comment_750489

I love the collaboration, but will have to dump it if we can't make it work right.

Out of curiosity, I ran SongShow Plus next to Proclaim and it tore through HD Video and never climbed over 350 MB or RAM even with 720p videos running.

Not sure what it uses for video playback, but it has been rock solid.

Right now we use Proclaim to loop announcements, then close it and use SongShow for singing and then switch back to Proclaim for sermons, and back to SongShow for a final song if we have one. I close Proclaim and on our system usually have to force quit to clear the memory usage for the next go round.

Hello Brandon, thanks for the information. What are the specs of your video card?

Brandon

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/750583#Comment_750583

Our whole computer specs are as follows...My laptop has a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M and it works fine from what I can tell on Windows 7. Neither is the most powerful on the face of the planet, but something must be goofy there.

Component

Details

Subscore

Base score

Processor

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 750 @ 2.67GHz

7.3

5.9

Determined by lowest subscore

Memory (RAM)

8.00 GB

7.6

Graphics

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT

6.5

Gaming graphics

4095 MB Total available graphics memory

6.5

Primary hard disk

251GB Free (596GB Total)

5.9

Windows 7 Professional

Scott Alexander

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/750905#Comment_750905

I should have specified this earlier (sorry) but if you could run dxdiag from a command prompt and "Save All Information..." and post it here that would be most helpful.

Brandon

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/750907#Comment_750907

Here ya go! Thanks!

5428.DxDiag.txt

Joey White

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/751726#Comment_751726

Our Church is having the same buggy issues described here. I have seen Scott Alexander's statement about DirectShow here and on another post - https://community.logos.com/forums/p/112957/749019.aspx. Is there any estimation on when an update to Proclaim with DirectShow be out?

Thanks

Nick Ericson (Proclaim)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/754964#Comment_754964

Please help us out test improvements to the current video player.

https://community.logos.com/forums/p/114040/755131.aspx