Jumping & jerking - what's the fix ?

  • I hate to seem always to be bringing up problems, but . . .

    It seems all the panoramas I do suffer from jerkiness. Even when they seem to have completely loaded I can't do a full pan without it stuttering and jerking and seeing ripples.

    For example, here is a test panorama (ignore the absolutely awful photography and poor focus - it's just a test !!!):
    http://www.multimediaaction.com/pantest-2/lib.html
    Not only is the thing constantly loading as you pan around (can't it just preload everything in the background !?), but even after that it simply won't smoothly do a 360-degree pan no matter how slow you go. It's very poor.

    Even in this example pano on KR it suffers from this:
    https://krpano.com/krpano.html?pa…leiongarten.xml

    But here is a FPP panorama which (when loaded) is absolutely silky smooth even at top rotation speed:
    http://www.vrwebdesign.co.uk/nhmflashtour/index.htm

    Why ? What do I need to do to make my panoramas pan absolutely smooth ?

  • I looked at your sample and while it's a bit slow in loading the tiles... the pan action was smooth... even at full speed spin.

    What video card do you have?
    Also - what browser and flash version are you using?

    I don't know of any known issues... but others have been having similar issues... maybe we can find a common issue between them.

  • i also have a quad core with 8gb of ram and a radeon 4850. this pc is bad ass. i get stuttering on some of my panos i think it is due to the crappy 15" lcd monitor I am using as there is no stutter at all from my laptop with significantly less solid hardware.

  • Hi,

    on my current computer (a laptop with 1.4 ghz) it pans very smooth,
    maybe the problem is the framerate, it was only set to 30 (<display fps="30" in the xml),
    try here a higher value - "60" for example,

    to preload all tiles of an image, set the "download" and "decode" values to "all" for every <level>

    best regards,
    Klaus

  • Thanks for the preload info Klaus.

    As for the framerate, I experimented with various rates, but opted for the lower value since if you choose to autorotate, a higher framerate chews up an amazing amount of CPU. Going from 60 to 30 more than halved the CPU hit yet I couldn't notice much of a difference in the display - and it didn't make any difference to the "stutters". I even tried upping to 90fps, but no effect.

    I've tested on FF3 & IE7 and on four machines ranging from a severely underpowered netbook to my video-editing quadcore, all with the same result. Yet others report totally smooth pans, and some have problems like mine ?! I don't understand. *confused*

    @VN2009: Load times is something else again. I think my host server (based in Sydney) needs investigation. Thanks for the report.

  • Try turning off "Enable Hardware Acceleration" in the Flash settings.

    where can i find that on a mac??

    edit: found it *thumbup* and it helps quite a lot *thumbsup* *thumbsup* *thumbsup*

    Thanx

    tuur *thumbsup*

  • I enabled "use smooth scrolling" in Firefox and that seems to have massively reduced the problem. But that's not turned on in the default installation so far as I know. There's no point in optimizing your own machine so the panoramas look nice - it's what everyone else sees that counts . . .

    ( And IE7 is still terrible ).

    I wonder if calling in some extra javascript smooth scrolling code in the xml would help ?

    Edited once, last by Richard (March 26, 2009 at 2:28 PM).

  • Richard, I have seen in your xml code that you turned flash10 on.

    Code
    details="16"
    tessmode="3"
    movequality="LOW"
    stillquality="HIGH"
    flash10="on"
    movequality10="HIGH"
    stillquality10="VERYHIGH"
    stilltime="0.25"
    />


    What if you turn it off?

  • If you want to quickly experiment with different settings to see what seems to work best... add the options plugin
    http://www.krpano.com/plugins/options/

    You can also just try playing with this sample...
    https://krpano.com/108beta/flash10_example.html

    ... and see if it behaves like yours... and just try different options on the settings.

    I can see a performance difference when changing movequality10 between low, high and highsharp... you might first just drop it to low and see what happens.

  • If I turn off Flash 10 then I start seeing wavy lines and ripples in straight edges. So I'm stuck with 10 for now.

    Turning on "smooth scrolling" in FireFox helps a lot, but again it's *wrong, wrong, wrong* to make changes on your own machine to get a good display ! It must look good on unmodified user machines.

    Gaydon: Good idea using this as a reference:
    https://krpano.com/108beta/flash10_example.html

    I'm testing all panos on three machines: high power quad; older "net surfer" 3GHz P4; and a low-power netbook. IE7 displays jerky (from terrible to passable) on all of them. Firefox is generally much better.

    IE7 is a notoriously bad browser, but it is also the world's most common browser.

    I'd like to see a baseline "test pano" on KR with a realistic "natural viewing" mousespeed (instead of crazy fast) and viewers to vote on whether they see it smooth or not. I think there's a problem, but would be very happy to be proved utterly wrong.

    Klaus, do you think there's any issue here at all, or is it just a matter of tweaking parameters ?

  • Hi,

    I only know about one problem with the "Active-X" Flashplayer:
    (it is used only in the Internet Explorer, all other Browsers uses the "NPAPI-Plugin" Flashplayer)

    on some Computers, sometimes only with enabled Flash Hardware Acceleration, sometimes only in Fullscreen Mode,
    and only while the Browser is loading (the tiles for example) - then the Mouse-Input it not directed intermediately
    to the Flashplayer, it seems the input was "collected" and the "executed" delayed at once, this causes a strange and stucky behavior!
    but only while loading! when the loading is finished the controlling would be normal again!
    I think this is a threading/priority problem between the Flashplayer, the Internet Explorer and the Graphics hardware/driver...

    can you describe the "jerky" you get on IE?
    is it like low framerate? what framerate did you get? (enable the showing of the framerate with the options plugin?)

    best regards,
    Klaus

  • Thanks for the ideas Klaus.

    I have added the options panel to my test pano. I've also upped the ramerate to 60fps and turned off autorotate and lowered the Flash 10 move quality to low.

    Th results while slowly panning in IE7 on the three machines are confusing:

    - The quadcore reports pretty steady framerate while panning in the 50-60 range. Displayed in a reasonably sized window the CPU barely gets off 1%. Displayed full screen on my 1920x1200 display on full "right button" rotation, all four cores run at about 60%.
    - If I hold down the "lright button" key I get very regular "hestitations" every 90 to 120 degrees

    - The P4 framerate while panning drops to only about 10fps ! (both IE & FF) The CPU is at 100%. Since it is now so slow the entire thing moves in litle jumps, but no "kerks". This machine is running dual 17-inch lcds off a Matrox 550, so not a great card, but probably not that different to many potential viewers.

    - The netbook (MSI Wind) while panning manages a pretty constant 30 - 45 fps. The CPU is 60 - 80%. It too gets regular hesitations, but probably not as bad as the quadcore. All up it is probably the best !

    (The jerky effect is almost like watching a video online at the edge of buffering: momentary tiny stops and starts)

    What does it all mean ? Of course all I'm trying to do is code the panos so they look smooth on an average viewer's machine. Bad pan = no business for me.

  • Unfortunately I'm completely baffled... but we're really pushing way beyond the limits of my knowledge.

    I was going to suggest trying a cube format... since it is supposed to require the least amount of processing power (I think that is what was said before)... BUT you already are.

    Since it looks like we are at the end of the line on options and ideas... any way you can do the same image as a sphere and see what happens?

  • Hey everyone,

    Regarding the jerky movement on the pan... When it jerks is it more like a "flicker" similar to a tv that has a "not all the way tuned in" interlacing flicker? Here's why I ask...

    Reading the thread, its pretty clear that its not a processing power issue as people here have some pretty heavy duty machines.... I currently have a Quad Core Running Vista 64 with 4Gb, 2 video cards, and 3 monitors hooked up to it. 2 of the monitors are..... Samsung 226BW (2ms response) and a Sceptre X20 (5ms response). The Samsung and Sceptre are both running at 1680x1050, both plugged in via DVI to a single Evga/Nvidia 9800GT card.....

    Given this... When I open one of my panos at http:/cleartours.com/portfolio in a 1024x768 IE7 window and have it span horizontally across the Samsung and the Sceptre monitor so that there are about equal parts of the IE7 window on each monitor.... It is VISABILLY noticable that the portion of the IE7 window being displayed on the Samsung pans smoother and jerks/flickers less than the portion of the IE7 window being displayed on the Sceptre Monitor. Very similar results using Mozilla as well.

    Just something to consider...

    Lee

    ---

    Lee Evans
    levans@cleartours.com

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