I have a rather peculiar problem. I'm running Windows 7 and have an Nvidia GTX 470 GPU. When I have a video playing in one window and try to scroll in another window that overlaps the video window, the screen tears vertically right where the video window is in the background. I've tried turning v-sync on to no avail. Also, in Ubuntu 10.10, I have no issues, nor do I when playing a game in Windows.
Any suggestions?
Take a capture of the video with the PrtScr key and paste it into MSPaint. It works as expected (ie, it pastes the frame from the video rather than a black rectangle) right?
The reason you get the problem with Aero on, but not off, is that when Aero is on, it uses the overlay surface, so video players and such can not make use of it, and have to render the video in software, which results in various artifacts, including tearing. When you turn Aero off, the video player is able to render the video on the hardware overlay, thus avoiding those problems.
Unless you’ve got a newer (ie DX10 compatible) video card with corresponding WDDM 1.1 drivers, or a card with more than one overlay surface (do any even exist?), then you’ll have to choose, or at least turn Aero off when you want to watch a video.
Windows won't double-buffer video output (EVR and DirectDraw) unless you have desktop composition (or DWM) enabled.
If you want to minimize tearing, enable DWM or Aero if you are using a media player which uses EVR, or any DirectX renderer.
