dindeldo

18th November 2002 11:18 UTC

advanced visualization studio
Question about the AVS.
2 months ago I was running winamp2 on a Pentium III 500 with a 32 MB graphicscard. AVS was really slow in fullscreen mode.
Now I have Winamp3 running on a 2100 Athlon with a 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 and the damn thing still won't run any faster. It still looks cool but it has absolutely nothing to do with the beat of the song. I thought that is what avs is for, or am I wrong?

So have I the wrong settings (It looks kinds acceptable at 50% using 800 & 600 resolution, i.e. if one has a very creative mind, one might see a connection between the rhythm of the mp3 and the stuff on the screen. If I go any higher it just looks silly), or is it bad programming? Or do I need a better machine still? That would really annoy me. Grrrrrr.

Please help?!

Greetings. Timo:(

Tuggummi

18th November 2002 11:42 UTC

*sigh*
Another one complaining about the speed of avs...

The fact is that you can't get super high framerates at those resolutions in avs (i assume you are trying to view avs in 800*600). You have to use a lot smaller resolution like 320*240 which is believe it or not, a pretty high resolution for avs if you want it to run smooth.

With that kind of machine you should be able to view most of the presets around with a decent 25-40 framerate with that resolution, but yet it depends how complex the avs preset is.

And avs isn't only about beat detection, it is up to the avs preset how it visualizes music. Some presets are beat responsive and others react to sound, some visualize music with a scope or have patterns that react to sound/beat. It is all about what kind of preset you are viewing.

If you are still looking for high framerates, try a standalone visualization plugin/component rather than avs, but don't expect that there is as much variety than in avs.

blazer1504

18th November 2002 16:10 UTC

If it has ABSOLUTELY no beatdetection, check 'advanced beat detection' from 'settings' ---> 'beat detection'

mikm

19th November 2002 00:59 UTC

also...
Also remember that AVS is done in the processor, not your graphics card. So, a great graphics card will not help you improve speed, but a fast processor will.

dirkdeftly

19th November 2002 04:08 UTC

And lastly, AVS is (virtually) the same in Winamp 3 as in Winamp 2. AVS is not a built-in component, and was not re-written for Winamp 3.

jheriko

25th November 2002 00:35 UTC

'2100 Athlon with a 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 '

How many OpenGL 3D demos have you made using all of the super-cool GF4 features? If the answer is none then you don't deserve such a powerful computer and graphics card. :p

(Wait till I get my 3.08ghz with nv30... the 3d world will bow before me... mwahahahaha)


How about we put something in the FAQ that says AVS should be run at WxH resolution for a computer with a N MHz processor. Sound like a good idea?

Another thing, try pixel doubling at 800x600 or 640x480... it tends to look better. Also try downloading my latest pack it has a small collection of presets designed specifically for running in high-res, like 1024x768, without pixel doubling.

Zevensoft

25th November 2002 05:31 UTC

I also designed Milkdrop2 (the preset, not the plugin) to run at high res.

2WienerDogz

5th July 2003 17:40 UTC

I have to agree with dindeldo and other posts in this forum regarding beat detection. AVS would appear to have little to none. If one cannot cause the visual in question to synch to the music (primarily via drums and bass), then to two become disconnected. Rather like turning on the TV without sound and playing a song on the stereo. You may eventually get a random event that is entertaining, but most of it is gonna be boring. Regardless, After much screwing about with AVS, I suspect that perhaps there is a technical reason beat detection seems elusive. But as I am dependent on the skills of others, I will simply finish with 'It would be SO nice if..."

13373571

5th July 2003 18:01 UTC

don't revive dead threads. It annoys people.

encina

7th July 2003 00:22 UTC

Feel I need to share a comment!
Okay I came here for the same reason as many others!
- What it wrong with my computer since it can´t run AVS?

Now I have read a few threaths and understand it´s because of my lacky CPU (xp 1700+) NOT my Radeon 9000pro.

Fair enough.

But people seems to still be complaining even though you programmers behind it, claims to have done a masterpice of work, and it can´t be rewritten to use GPU because of its structure. You even threw a person out because he wouldn´t accept that :eek:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....hreadid=107033

Well let me put it this way.
I´m pretty sure you have done a masterpice of work on it, and we can all see that in it´s complexity :D
I love to see it showing of a long with the totally outstanding skins for winamp3. But I don´t use it because it KILLS my CPU. Eating above 80% cpu, my cpu gets to hot for me to accept for so little a window! What is the point of spending so many hours on something that is useless?

I´m a programmer myself (for living) and when we get "critisied" of our customers we listen to them. We don´t throw them out caliming we know better then them! Ofcause situation as a bit diffenrent, because we live from our customers. But I believe your attitude could be the same anyway. We have even tryed throwing away months of work, used our experience to start from all over, and done it 5 times better the second time, even though our work was brilliant the first time already :)

I understand you won´t accept people calling you 4 letter words, just because they can´t understand your happines for your own work.

And to those of you who claims to be happy with 320*256. I envy you in a way that you can accept that "quality". I CAN´T - so DON´T say I shall. I have seen much more impresive things on the Amiga 500 in 1991, then AVS in 320*256 on a present 19" monitor!

All in all this post - I belive - is about you programmers to see if not you can use your experienses to develop a NEW avs, that is uptodate? Listen to the masses and forget for a moment how brillint your previous work is.
Though there is A LOT of awesome avs-presets already out there, to me it won´t be a requirement the it can run the "old" presets. New ones are garantied to come fast, if you where to release a new avs :)

(Hope I don´t get thrown out for commenting such a hot subject, that you obvoiusly hate! ;) )

Best Regards
Encina

mikm

7th July 2003 01:14 UTC

only mods have the power to ban people and it has to be for a good reason. a person cannot be banned for disagreeing, so you are safe. what probably happened to that user is that he posted something that blantantly insulted people (maybe rm.txt). the thread was deleted and he was banned.

second, none of us have the source code for avs so none of us can update it. we want to keep it backwards-compatible so that none of our presets are outdated. we have been asking for updates to avs for a very long time to no avail.

anubis2003

7th July 2003 01:44 UTC

Like michael said - we aren't the programmers of AVS - we cannot update it, although many of us would if we could. Unfortunately, nullsoft is making a lot of stuff right now(mainly Winamp 5), so nobody has been doing anything for AVS.

It appears that, after looking through that thread, the one guy(damien whatever) was banned for, not because he wouldn't accept it, but because

Originally posted by peter
crossposting, whining on the same topic on all forums, flaming developers, and generally being an ass is not welcome here.

Deamon

8th July 2003 10:29 UTC

It would be so much easier for all of us if Nullsoft would give out the source code to AVS :rolleyes:. Though that is said so many times, I start wondering if they'd ever read it.

mikm

8th July 2003 15:20 UTC

No. It would not. This was brought up earlier...if there are many different versions of AVS floating around then you would need a seperate version of AVS for almost every pack/preset in existence

anubis2003

8th July 2003 16:01 UTC

But if one person made one sweet version of AVS and all the others sucked(or weren't nearly as good), then that wouldn't be a problem. A colaborative effort taking different components from many different people could be good as well.

UnConeD

8th July 2003 23:21 UTC

Um encina, you're forgetting a couple of things:

- We are 'customers' as well, who have very little control over AVS' speed and have to depend on Nullsoft's whim.

- AVS is free, so you can't expect professional quality support.


Do you realize how much work is going on 'behind the scenes'? I've written some very optimized filters for AVS (Colormap for example). Each one contains a minimum amount of MMX instructions that processes whole pixels at a time (texer does 2 at a time because less processing is required). Processing this sort of stuff in software is SLOOOOOOOOW. And rewriting it for hardware is not as straightforward as you would think, because you have to rethink your entire model. Plus, only recently has it become possible to do your custom effects on the GPU using pixelshaders, and most people don't have a capable card for that.

So far, the only component of AVS which has been proven to be very inefficient is the scripting language (I've been poking around a disassembly of AVS, see the thread 'AVS Mysteries'). But then again, this was never meant to evaluate complicated stuff. For the rest, fast MMX code is used to processes entire pixels at a time as fast as the CPU (and more importantly the system RAM) can handle them.

I'm perfectly happy with 320x240, because AVS' visuals keep on being interesting. If you want fast visuals, try Milkdrop. It's also customizable to a certain degree and runs hardware accelerated. But IMO not as interesting...

encina

9th July 2003 17:51 UTC

Okay first of all, sorry for mistaken the owners of this forum. I thought this was NullSofts forum, and my first message was only aimed to the developers behind AVS, not you presetwriters :)

Now thank you UnConeD... You just perfectly illustraited my point :D
I don´t realize how much work is going on 'behind the scenes' and as a "customer" I don´t care one bit! As a user I see the result, and if that is useless, then the more hours that has been put into it, the more hours has been "spilled"!
UnConeD you just argumented once more "technicly" how brilliant AVS is, and as mentioned before, I think there are enough of those argumentations already and it doesn´t fix the problem, that many think there is something wrong with their computers!

I´m a freeware-developer myself, thats why I didn´t order anybody to do anything. I just asked for someone to try spend a few hours to see if he or she could come up with a brilliant sollution to fix this problem. One way could be to start from scratch, and if that is necessary then it´s important to forget all the hours already spend, else you won´t feel like starting all over! - Thats a fact :)

anubis2003

9th July 2003 21:39 UTC

We do not have the AVS source code. We cannot go and spend a few hours editing it to make it better. I really wish I could, but I can't. Nullsoft has not made an update to AVS in a long time, despite our pleas.

If you are a software developer then why don't you just "start from scratch" and create a new visualization studio instead of trying to get us to? Instead of asking us to just go and spend hours of our time, you could do it yourself. This is not our job, we make AVS presets as a hobby and have fun with it. Making a new visualization studio would be difficult, to say the least. Especially with some of the things that would be really nice to have(hardware support, etc). We are all in the same boat you are - we want something better, but Nullsoft is not making any updates. Maybe they will update AVS in Winamp 5 - who knows.

encina

9th July 2003 23:00 UTC

I believe I might be mistaken here anubis2003. I still aim my comment to the guys behind AVS (Nullsoft guys) about doing it better. NOT you presetwriters.

I fully agree with you all - It would be great to have it better, it would be great to be able to participate in the improovements, though I´m not a graphicprogrammer - Yet :)

I´m a professionel webdeveloper doing windowsforms in my sparetime, so I have no chance of doing a new AVS just like that. Then some of you might think "How can he even tell anybody to do it better when he doesn´t know whats behind it all!" Then please remember I´m only wishing for it, not telling anybody to do anything :)

mikm

9th July 2003 23:03 UTC

The AVS writers are never down here...they never listen to our wishes. If you want to aim it at the preset writers, I suggest you complain about AVS not being updated in the Winamp 2 Wishlist :p

UnConeD

10th July 2003 05:04 UTC

encina: actually you're the one who doesn't understand. People have been so bullshitted by marketing hype that they think they have become experts. You claim the end result of AVS is useless and a waste of time. Yet tons of people are enjoying AVS visualisations all around the world, even using them for projections at parties. And in my own experience, flashy visualisations like dancing 3D girls tend to capture people's attention for a couple of minutes, but put something like AVS on, and people will stare for hours and the endlessly varying and uniquely responsive visuals. I've seen it at parties, where the main audience is people who are complete outsiders to the visualisation scene. And that's even with 'low-resolution' AVS stuff!

On the other hand, if people think 320x240 or 400x300 is unacceptably low, then I won't try and change their opinion.
In fact, We KNOW that most of it is actually in the head and just pure non-sense:
we've had people here claiming that 'turning on pixel-doubling has improved everything because it allows them to run at higher resolutions'. If you don't know what pixel-doubling is, it's an option in AVS that resizes the image horizontally and vertically by 200% by making every point 2x2 pixels large, because older cards sometimes don't support resolutions below 640x480 at 32-bit.
So in fact, 800x600 pixel-doubled is the same as regular 400x300, and people *have* told us that the first looks better.

My take on the whole thing? I don't care. If someone says to you "You know, we put a guy on the moon nearly 35 years ago. And now we still don't have a lunar base or have visited Mars! That's rediculous!" how will you reply to that? Do you still feel the person shouldn't care about what was 'going on behind the scenes', about the political, social and economic events that lead to the space race in the first place?


If your car is overloaded with stuff in the trunk, then you might have trouble going up steep hills and such. Will you still complain to the manufacturer that 'suddenly your car got a lot slower for no reason'?


You keep yapping on about 'customers', but you seem to be forgetting that the whole point of a customer is that he chooses what he wants to buy or use. And contrary to what marketing dogma seems to teach, sometimes it's better not to have a customer. If they don't like it here, they are free to go elsewhere. AVS is a free product with no warranties or guarantees.

And you don't seem to have made a solution either. Should Nullsoft 'pull-an-AMD' and introduce its own resolution scale like AMD did for the megahertz thing (people were only looking at megehertz)?
"It runs at 320x240, but we call it 640+480++ because it offers as much enjoyment as a regular plug-in at 640x480".
People just have to deal with the fact that AVS doesn't run at high resolutions, it's that simple.

encina

10th July 2003 19:31 UTC

UnConeD: I don´t understand your point!
What is it I don´t understand? - Have I claimed to be an expert? - Have I claimed that AVS isn´t impresive? No! AVS is impresive and nice looking, I just claim it´s a damn shame it kills my CPU while being it, resulting in that I will not use it. Let me say that in other words: I will not use it everyday, though I would like to. But in the occation of a party, ofcause its only for a few hours while I will not need the resources for something else.
When I compare the result of AVS with eg. Vice City, I see the big picture. AVS could be faster/nicer if someone at Nullsoft had the will to make it better.
I came here thinking I would help you guys by speaking to Nullsoft about how brilliant AVS would be if it used the hardware properly. But instead I ended up offending AVS-fans!!!

If my car could climb a very steep mountain with a trunkload of rocks, but couldn´t climb anoter hill with only my family in the backsead - yes then I would complain. But not untill I know what causes the malfunction. In this case I know it´s AVS not using hardware properly, and that I believe is enough for me to speak up.

You keep yapping on about 'customers', but you seem to be forgetting that the whole point of a customer is that he chooses what he wants to buy or use. And contrary to what marketing dogma seems to teach, sometimes it's better not to have a customer. If they don't like it here, they are free to go elsewhere. AVS is a free product with no warranties or guarantees.
That is exatly what I am NOT doing. I would go elsewhere if I didn´t see any future for AVS on my computer. I see myself as a user of a free programme, where I would like to currage the people behind it to do it even better. In my opinion they have put focus a little to much on flexibility rather then performance. Thats all I´m trying to say.

UnConeD

11th July 2003 00:34 UTC

Well the following sentence was pretty unambiguous:
"As a user I see the result, and if that is useless, then the more hours that has been put into it, the more hours has been "spilled"!"

And trust me, doing a hardware accelerated version of AVS is not as straightforward as you might think. A 3D card is still a 'stupid' machine that limits your freedom. Only if you start using shaders do you get more abilities but that puts such a huge limitation on the audience that it's not a feasable option (yet) IMO.

shreyas_potnis

11th July 2003 17:28 UTC

To do this, I believe you will have to start from scratch. Then whats the use of calling it an update? This would create a totally new component, wont it? And Encina, you are talking about speaking to the 'nullsoft' people; I doubt whether you will gain anything. The wishlist (not modified since June 2002) still isnt fulfilled, and its more than a year now.
And btw, you can always bitch about it in 'The Bitchlist' :D

jheriko

12th July 2003 09:52 UTC

Just want to add that a 3.06ghz p4 with loads of superfast ram can run the majority of avs really smoothly at 640x480.

The whole thing with avs being slow is that it is really complex in ways other than graphical, most of what makes it slow is the fact that it has to interpret your code and use custom values... etc. if avs were taken as it were now and all of the effects were made hardware rendered i don't think that there would be much of a speed boost because of this.

encina

12th July 2003 11:31 UTC

Ohh finally I succeded in making you understand my point, instead of thinking I was bitching you out :D

And UnConeD - yes I admit that sentence was unambiguous, but I was only trying to illustrate that as a developer you must accept the fact, that if a user/customer isn´t happy with your result, telling him that you spend 1000 hours doing it, he will still not be happy with your result. He would just think "Glad it wasn´t my time that was used for it" :(

shreyas_potnis - I´m beginning to understand that Nullsoft never looks through these files! I´ll remember "The bitchlist" :D

jheriko - Are you saying that AVS is a scripting language?

I´ve noticed another thing about AVS. I also read another threat about it. It seems to use 90% CPU resources no matter what resolution it runs in. The smaller the res the higher fps are achived. The threat was about fps-limmiting. If there is no proper object to use for wait() in AVS then you can never achive a fps-limmiter that doesn´t use the cpu! Meaning that no matter how you run AVS, how you write presets for it, or how big a CPU that is used, it will always use 90% CPU power!
Isn´t this correct?

shreyas_potnis

12th July 2003 17:37 UTC

AVS is partly scriptable, only ssc's, m's, md's, ds's, bump's, ddm's or any other i might have forgotten

Phaze1987

12th July 2003 19:02 UTC

...shreyas means superscopes,movements,dynamic movements,dynamic shifts,bumps and dynamic distance modifiers.