Left Side of Screen Flashes

Hey all,

I'm designing an experiment in which in each trial there are two videos that is being shown together - one in every side of the screen . For some reason, the video in the left side of the screen flashes - it starts to play,flashes, and then continues. It happens in three different computers, but in the fourth computer it doesn't (all computers have windows XP and the same DirectRT version).

For some reason it happens only in the left side of the screen - it doesn't matter which video is shown in which side.

Thanks.

(Noam -- I hope it's ok if we redirect the email thread here)

It seems that the most likely reason for this error (that I can think of) could be due to the display device.

If this is the case --
Either the display device is having trouble properly rendering both videos together in DirectRT's native frame-precise environment,
Or the display drivers being used with the display device are outdated.

I would first recommend seeing if there are possibly more recent drivers for your machine that could be downloaded from the manufacturer.
If your display drivers are up to date, we may want to try connecting through a support session to see if I can find an alternative solution to the problem.

We've further contemplated the issue and have a few more suggestions to add.

First, I would recommend seeing if altering the position of the video reduces or removes the flickering. From here, you could also try adjusting the size of the video, changing the screen's resolution, modifying the color depth of your monitor, and so on until some type of noticeable pattern to fix the problem is found.

Hm.

It may also be helpful to note that in the past users have experienced problems when using an onboard Intel chipset to render graphics (as you're setup is using) --
A solution to this would be to instead use a dedicated graphics card; however installing a new piece of hardware into your machine isn't usually an ideal option.

I hope that this information is useful.

[I][I][edited from support email][/I][/I]

First of all - thank you for your answers and help.

Unfortunately, although I downloaded the updates and tried to change the resolution and such, the problem remains.
We are thinking about purchasing a new driver that will be able to display those experiments properly - do you know what are the requirements from a display driver so it will be able to display two videos at the same time?

Installing an on-board graphics card should fix the problem.

Just about any on-board graphics card you can find will work.

The manual notes:
[quote]It is strongly recommended that systems running DirectRT have at least 64mb of memory, a graphics card with at least 4mb of video memory and a processor speed of at least 300mhz.[/quote]

This recommendation includes just about any graphics card you can currently purchase.

If you would like, I would be open to making a suggestion on the card to purchase and install -- all I would need to do is analyze the DxDiag file you've supplied.