Development environment
I’m quite happy with my development environment. A 1920 by 1200 Samsung display for a good view into Visual Studio 2008 and a Philips HDTV as a second display. The TV synchronizes to anything from 47 something Hz to 60 Hz and much there in between. It is for instance easy to test a small mismatch in rate by setting the refresh rate to 49.95 Hz and play 25/50 fps material.

I have now merged all the new stuff from the trunk (main line of MPC-HC development) into my branch. Also, I believe a lot of my own bugs are fixed. Frame-stepping seems to work and I haven’t had any hangings lately.

I still need to do more testing with respect to stability and I hope you guys out there can continue helping out (thanks!). All those threads and timings in the code are tricky. Some people actually say that the DirectShow library is Microsoft’s most difficult library to master. Maybe, maybe not. At least it’s not entirely straight-forward. Having said that, I still think it’s a very elegant library.

As I said earlier, I stripped the existing renderers of all sync code when starting to implement mine. Now I’m considering putting some of it back again, like the GPU flushes that seem to solve some problems for some people. Then again, I don’t think MPC-HC should provide a fix for every driver bug that’s out there. Instead I believe we should learn to avoid hardware that doesn’t stay clear of tearing and other artifacts. Evidently there are some good hardware and good drivers out there too. I for instance seem to have been lucky with all my various NVidia and ATI/AMD boards. My empathy for some of you guys would perhaps have been better, had I been less lucky, but so it goes.

Download the new version from the download page.