Tearing in videos with aero off.

[Mendel]

If I or some application decide(s) to change from aero to basic theme in Windows 7 and I then watch any video with any player, I seem to get occasional tearing. It´s like 1-10 seconds of really annoying tearing once every couple of minutes or so. I get a vertical line running across the screen and going up or down a little bit while its tearing... I have used youtube, vlc player and whatever the browser based player is running nfl gamepass on browser.

If I change back to aero theme, this problem goes away. It happens with gtx580 but it was worse with a Radeon 5870 (tearing for longer at a time).

So there is no real problem since just sticking to aero theme totally bypasses the problem. But I am interested as to why this happens? Why does the theme matter as to how smoothly videos play?

 

[Davros]

little thought
with aero your screen is in d3d mode, thus settings like vysnc in your gfx card 3d settings kick in

you could try creating a bat file to the media player and then a shortcut to the bat file

net start uxsms
"C:\ProgramFiles(x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /prefetch:1
net stop uxsms

edit: found this about mediaportal but it may not be specific to that program

"Please be aware that disabling AERO under Vista will introduce tearing. MediaPortal's V-sync is managed by the AERO and with AERO disabled it is not possible to "snap" frame presentation to the v-sync (in theory it would be possible, but would require lot of ugly code in dshowhelper.dll)."

 

[Bludd]

I think it all depends on which renderer is in use. Try MPC-HC (32 bit) with madvr.