We purchased a new laptop to use for projecting song lyrics, sermon slides and and other elements of the service.
Today was our first live trial.
I’m pleased to report that the problem I had before where Quelea would suddenly show output on Monitor 1 did not occur.
Unfortunately there was another problem.
The background videos loop, and when they hit the end of the loop, the text is truncated, and around 80% of the text is lost.
This laptop has only an HDMI output, and we’re using an HDMI to VGA adapter to get the signal to the projector.
I brought the laptop home, and connected it to a standard monitor, but I’m unable to reproduce the problem.
Edit: I left the same slide on screen for several minutes, and the video truncated even on my home monitor – but it took several loops before it occurred
If you click on another verse/chorus and back again, all is well – at least until you hit the end of a loop.
I found some mention in some of the issues on GitHub regarding overlay settings in VLC
This appears to bear on the problem I had with the old laptop where the video flickered on repeat. I had hoped it would solve this:
What I have found so far:
VLC (3.0.7.1) and Quelea (2019.0) are both 64-bit
Although the above settings change was made it does not completely solve the problem
When a song is moved preview the video background shows only as an icon – except for .mov files. When “go live” is clicked, the title of the song briefly appears, then disappears when the video activates. I can work around this by leaving a couple of blank lines in the song before the title, and click on the title once the video starts. If there are no blank lines before the title, you can’t get the title to display unless you select a verse and go back.
When a verse is selected the words display. Sometimes they will also disappear entirely on their own, sometimes they can disappear if the main window is resized. This will also sometimes bring them back.
Last Sunday, I set up a full two hours ahead of service start time, and went through the entire service as the band practices. It worked fine.
After practice, I opened a second instance of VLC to play some background music.
When service started the words all disappeared after a couple of seconds whenever I selected a verse. It was so bad, I edited all songs to use still images – which work fine.
I suspect that this is some interaction problem between Quelea and VLC, since if I understand correctly, video backgrounds require VLC to operate.
I won’t be there on the 7th, so I am going to use still images for all songs.
Also, I don’t want to switch to the beta version unless I can be there to monitor it.
When “go live” is clicked, the title of the song briefly appears, then disappears when the video activates.
Update:
I installed 2019.1 today, and initial testing shows that this did not occur.
When a verse is selected the words display. Sometimes they will also disappear entirely on their own, sometimes they can disappear if the main window is resized. This will also sometimes bring them back.
This behaviour al did not occur. The words did not disappear at any time over the four hour test.
I won’t have an opportunity to test this during a service for two week. Until then I will use still image backgrounds which always worked.
It occurred to me that it might be something in the command line options that are sent to vlc – is there any way to see them or change them?
Good to hear that the update seems to have resolved your issues! As far as I know, these are the only options sent to VLC that are not directly modified by the library we use. However, since we use a Java library to handle the communication between Quelea and VLC, there’s no easy way for you to change them unless you download and build the code yourself.
<sigh>
I thought we had this licked, but last Sunday I included a few full motion backgrounds, and they failed instantly.
The first symptom is that the background is on top of the title slide.
From there, sometimes you see the words, sometimes you don’t.
I think that it might be related to running a separate instance of VLC to play music before the service, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet.
I’m not able to test anything until Sep 8 though so we’re on static images once again tomorrow.
Thanks for posting this, we are having similar issues, words disappear during songs. We are also using video loop backgrounds. Music is played before church using VLC. I will have a play with suggestions here and see if it resolves anything.
We ran Qulea today with just a solid colour background, there was no interference with the text. This seems to confirm the video loop theory.
The video loop we used previously was an MPG with the following properties.
Codec: MPEG-1/2 Video (mpgv)
Video Resolution 1280x720
Buffer dimensions: 1280x736
Frame rate 29.970030
Decoded format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV
Orientation: Top left
Chroma location: Centre
This loop is configured via global settings, not per song. I wonder if loops are per song if the issue disappears? Maybe a number of loops issue?
I also note this is a video in a smaller format than our display resolution 1280x720 vs 1980x1080.
Our next step is to try a different loop.
We have set the following loop, stay tuned for the results!
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)
Language: English
Video Resolution: 1920x1080
Buffer dimensions: 1920x1088
Frame rate: 29.970030
Orientation: Top left
Color primaries: ITU-R BT.709
Color space: ITU-R BT.709 Range
Chroma location: Left
The new video has less issues, but we still are getting some times where this still happens. I have also upgraded RAM from 4GB to 32GB, and will upgrade the i5 to an i7. There is a new video card on order. I don’t think these horsepower type of upgrades will help, but it doesn’t hurt to try all options. Quelea 2020.0 has been installed.
i7 has been installed, had same issue in music practice, but none I am aware of in service. My last hardware upgrade I am trying is a much better video card, hopefully this will arrive this week. I am not super hopeful about this, but lets give it a go.
OK, nVidia Quadro P400 video card (3 x mini DisplayPort) is installed, replacing the onboard video on this machine, a Dell Optiplex 2020 (2x DisplayPort, 1 x VGA). I also have changed the background video from a 30 second loop to a 4:50 minute video. Maybe reducing the number of loops occurring will help? Of course making two changes at once is awesome practice… Since I have lots of RAM now (32GB!) I could even just have a 2 hour video that plays, thus no loops at all. Maybe a night time video from a hill overlooking our town?
The biggest problem with this issue is the seemingly random nature of it, if I could reliably reproduce the problem it would so much easier to find a solution.
Latest on this issue. We got arround this by using a global theme, with a 1 hour video. Problem solved, yippee. Then a new pastor wants moving backgrounds, oh and the background to change per slide. So we created 15m video loops. Problem should have been avoided, no such luck. Now words are dropping out for the audience again. This problem really needs input from the programming guru’s.
