Topic: Full Screen Exclusive Mode for MPV - Extra Smoothness
EDIT: OLD Post - CHECK 3RD REPLY ON THIS THREAD:
Ever wonder how at certain moments in Films or TV Shows some panning shots aren't perfectly smooth? Even though there are no dropped frames or delayed frames in the diagnostics information section of MPV.
EDIT - Read the Edit Note at the end after reading the full original post first:
For example in the beginning of Episode 1 of Season 8 of Game of Thrones, there is a panning shot from left to right as the kid climbs the tree and looks at the army moving in below him. Sometimes in that scene the smoothness is not 100%, even though there are no dropped frames, or any indicators that there is a CPU or GPU bottleneck. It just looks choppy, replay it by clicking back five seconds and it runs smooth, replay it again, and it feels and looks choppy (no consistency).
Well, after months of messing around with that scene specifically, because it was pissing me off; I researched on how to use Full Screen Exclusive Mode for MPV, to test if it has an impact.
Yes, the impact is very clear, I restarted those 5 seconds over 30 times without it once feeling not smooth. Always ran perfectly smooth after forcing MPV into Full Screen Exclusive Mode.
Here's how to do it:
Edit the MPV Configuration file, and add this line as a single line by itself anywhere in the configuration:
ontopThat's it, if you enter full-screen mode now, it will automatically become Full Screen Exclusive Mode:
Makes the player window stay on top of other windows.
On Windows, if combined with fullscreen mode, this causes mpv to be treated as exclusive fullscreen window that bypasses the Desktop Window Manager.
Quote via: https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#options-ontop
MPV Configuration File is located (C:\Users\YourUsernameHere\AppData\Roaming\mpv), and should be called mpv.conf. If it's not in this directory, create the mpv folder in the Roaming folder, and create a notepad file which you add your settings to that should be renamed to mpv.conf (with extensions visible) after it is saved.
EDIT Note:
Requires further testing, but on first glance, I can confirm that there is a certain performance increase in using Full Screen Exclusive Mode in MPV. Around 15% to 20% increase in performance actually. While I played 1080p content, and 4K content at 60FPS, before I had to set 4K HDR Content to 2X Movie (48FPS) to not get any dropped and delayed frames. Now I am testing the scene very hard scenes from Blue Planet 2 4K HDR episode 5 after minute 40 (it is a very intense scene that always dropped frames at 60FPS), now it is working smoothly at 60FPS. I will try some more movies and TV shows later, but this is very promising.