Videos (in particular anime) looks stuttery on my 144hz

[blamore]

Maybe you made a mistake in smplayer and instead of "mpv" you have selected "mplayer?"

I uninstalled and reinstalled again, this time unchecking mplayer (both were selected before, but mpv was still selected in that menu). Makes no difference

[blamore]

Maybe you made a mistake in smplayer and instead of "mpv" you have selected "mplayer?"

Unless there are other places that I should set to mpv. Even when I installed both, that option was set to mpv by default.

[RealNC]

Found the issue. In the smplayer preferences, in the "General" section, in the "Video" tab, select "gpu" in the "Output driver" field. Then, go back to the advanced settings, and in the mpv options prepend "--gpu-api=opengl" so that it looks like this:

Code: Select all

--gpu-api=opengl --video-sync=display-resample --interpolation --profile=gpu-hq --blend-subtitles=video --scale=ewa_lanczossharp --dscale=mitchell

This is the best setting, but requires a GPU with proper support for OpenGL. NVidia and AMD graphics cards qualify for that. I'm not sure what happens if you only have intergrated Intel graphics.

Edit:
By the way, the "--blend-subtitles=video" option is a subjective quality setting. It renders the subtitles at the same resolution as the video and blends them into the actual video, making them look like they are hard-subs. This prevents 480p or 720p anime having native display resolution HD subtitles, which looks kinda weird. However, if you actually prefer subtitles to be HD (rendered at your native screen resolution) when watching lower resolution content, then you should remove that option.

[blamore]

Found the issue. In the smplayer preferences, in the "General" section, in the "Video" tab, select "gpu" in the "Output driver" field. Then, go back to the advanced settings, and in the mpv options prepend "--gpu-api=opengl" so that it looks like this:

Code: Select all

--gpu-api=opengl --video-sync=display-resample --interpolation --profile=gpu-hq --blend-subtitles=video --scale=ewa_lanczossharp --dscale=mitchell

This is the best setting, but requires a GPU with proper support for OpenGL. NVidia and AMD graphics cards qualify for that. I'm not sure what happens if you only have intergrated Intel graphics.

Edit:
By the way, the "--blend-subtitles=video" option is a subjective quality setting. It renders the subtitles at the same resolution as the video and blends them into the actual video, making them look like they are hard-subs. This prevents 480p or 720p anime having native display resolution HD subtitles, which looks kinda weird. However, if you actually prefer subtitles to be HD (rendered at your native screen resolution) when watching lower resolution content, then you should remove that option.

Man, you spent so much time to help me thanks.
Now the video quality is good, and the stutter effect is gone, but when I fullscreen the video, there is a 2 second black screen in between. It is almost as if I am alt+tab'ing a video game.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Man, you spent so much time to help me thanks.
Now the video quality is good, and the stutter effect is gone, but when I fullscreen the video, there is a 2 second black screen in between. It is almost as if I am alt+tab'ing a video game.

That's normal. The video player has siezed exclusive control of your screen during full screen mode, playing videos through an OpenGL frame buffer -- the same kind of frame buffer used for video games.

In fact, you might now even unwittingly also have variable refresh rate (GSYNC, FreeSync) automatically in use for videos -- that's very helpful for destuttering videos too, especially if the videos have odd frame rates (18fps, 23fps, 25fps, 48fps, etc). Not all videos are exactly 24fps, 30fps or 60fps. And the interpolation may create new framerates (e.g. 24fps->48fps etc) that variable refresh rate helps.

smplayer is one of the few players that works with VRR

[LancerMiG]

Thanks for the in-depth thread, I was kinda stuck with the same issue that I couldn't solve. I wanted to ask, but there was no need for it with you guys!

[blamore]

Man, you spent so much time to help me thanks.
Now the video quality is good, and the stutter effect is gone, but when I fullscreen the video, there is a 2 second black screen in between. It is almost as if I am alt+tab'ing a video game.

That's normal. The video player has siezed exclusive control of your screen during full screen mode, playing videos through an OpenGL frame buffer -- the same kind of frame buffer used for video games.

In fact, you might now even unwittingly also have variable refresh rate (GSYNC, FreeSync) automatically in use for videos -- that's very helpful for destuttering videos too, especially if the videos have odd frame rates (18fps, 23fps, 25fps, 48fps, etc). Not all videos are exactly 24fps, 30fps or 60fps. And the interpolation may create new framerates (e.g. 24fps->48fps etc) that variable refresh rate helps.

smplayer is one of the few players that works with VRR

Is it possible to not have this happen. I switch back and forth very frequently.

[RealNC]

You can try and download the most recent windows mpv build and overwrite the smplayer one. More recent mpv builds might not require you to use the "--gpu-api=opengl" option for this to work.

[artins90]

I am trying to get 48 fps playback in mpv, the VRR window of my monitor is 35-60Hz, running on Nvidia's freesync compatibility mode.
What I would like mpv to do is setting the vsync ratio to 2 instead of 2.5.
I am new to mpv, I spend a couple of hours messing around with all the refresh rate settings listed in the manual but I can't figure it out.

[Chief Blur Buster]

I am trying to get 48 fps playback in mpv, the VRR window of my monitor is 35-60Hz, running on Nvidia's freesync compatibility mode.
What I would like mpv to do is setting the vsync ratio to 2 instead of 2.5.
I am new to mpv, I spend a couple of hours messing around with all the refresh rate settings listed in the manual but I can't figure it out.

Are you sure that the video is intrisinically fluid in itself -- sometimes anime is recorded so badly that the file will naturally stutter, because the stutter is actually pre-recorded into the video file. One can tell by single-frame-stepping through the video, that some frames are shown once (1), and some frames are repeated (2 duplicate frames), and some are repeated even more (3 or more duplicate frames), in an erratic cadence such as 1:2:1:2 or 1:2:3:2:1:2:3 etc.