APPENDIX B - Guidelines for DirectShow configuration through K-Lite

[bobmatura]

Within the ActiveDJ Studio online help, appendix B seems to be outdated.  FFDSHOW is no longer used, there is no longer separate installers for 32 and 64 bit, etc. 

The reason I'm looking at this appendix is because I have 2 Win10 machines where video is not playing, it shows a grey screen.  On 2 other Win10 test machines, video plays fine, with same MP4s and using same exact version of K-Lite.  What settings does ActiveDJ Studio need for K-Lite?  Any help at all troubleshooting this would be great.

- Bob Matura

[Administrator]

Hello Bob,

you are right, Appendix B of the help file is definitely outdated and should be modified: this will be done shortly.

When dealing with DirectShow the main point that needs to be verified is the compatibility of the video driver with the output of the filters graph.

A first test you could perform would be launching the GraphStudioNext application, installed by default by K-Lite, and rendering the same troublesome video files: in this situation our component is not involved at all so, if the video should not render correctly, the problem would be the video driver or some of the instanced filters not compatible with it.
In this case receiving the screenshot of the filters graph would be in any case of help to understand what's involved and, as a second info, a log generated by the DxDiag utility (usually installed inside the \Windows\System32 folder) would help in understanding what's currently installed inside the system in terms of drivers and filters.

In case the video clip should render without problems in GraphStudioNext, the problem could be an issue with the driver of the video card not managing correctly certain color spaces when the InfinitePinTee filter is in use: this specific DirectShow filter is used by our component in order to allow attaching multiple video outputs and is not used by normal video programs which simply render the video stream on a single output window.
The MP4 format is a sort of container, just like the WAV and AVI formats, who may contain different kinds of encoding: in most cases the sub-format in use is the H264 one and there is the possibility that the LAV decoder (the default in use by K-Lite for MP4) suffers some kind of problem when interfacing the InfinitePinTee filter, probably due to the format of the output video stream; unfortunately our component doesn't have control over the output format of the LAV decoder so there may be the need to make some fine tuning inside the properties page of the LAV decoder itself; we would try the following:
1 - inside the Windows "Start" menu select "K-Lite Codec Pack/Codec Tweak Tool"
2 - inside the "Configuration" section press the "DirectShow filters" button
3 - under the "Video decoders" column select the "LAV video decoder" button
4 - on this page you will find a number of checkboxes inside the "Output formats" groupbox, each indicating a different output format
5 - on our system the "YV12" format seems to be the default one so we would try to uncheck the "YV12" checkbox and press the "Apply" button without closing the page
6 - now try to reload the video using our component and see if it works; if it shouldn't, you may try to uncheck other check boxes until the problem disappears: we would leave the "YUY2" checkbox checked which, at least here, seems to work correctly: please, don't forget to press the "Apply" button each time you uncheck one or more checkboxes

Hope this will be of some help.

Kind Regards

Severino Delaurenti
MultiMedia Soft