Windows Media Player 11 Visualization oddly poor performance

[laforgej 0]

My windows media player 11 has seemed to have developed a problem. Well actulally it has always been doing this. I am running a P4 (2.8GHz with 512 ram, 64MB vram), and when I try to activate the visualization in WMP 11 all it is horribly slow and pixelized. I would guess about 5 fpsNormally I would just accept this and keep saving for a new computer but the second that there is something covering even part of the visualization screen, it ups it's performance. If you put a separate window over the vis screen (even the slightest corner of a window) the performance ups to a good level and the CPU usage will drop from about 80% to 30%. This has had me confused and I was wondering if anyone else had seen this.

[rvalkass 5]

Yeah, this happened to me with every version of WMP I have had on my old PC, but not on the new one. The only difference between the two that I could think would be causing it is that the old computer has an integrated graphics chip, while my new PC has a dedicated graphics card.My laptop, however, (2.2GHz, 1024MB RAM) has integrated graphics and yet can still display the visualisations fine, even when I am running multiple other, quite intensive, applications. Presumably this is down to the extra RAM compared to the 256MB I have on my old desktop.

[farsiscript 0]

i agree rvalkass my laptop has 2.4 GHZ , 256MB Ram but my mediaplayer is very slow and i can not work with this action , if i can remove version 11 please guide me to unistall version 11 to version 10 thanks

[darran 0]

With regards to WMP 11, I only installed it on my desktop I bought 3 years ago, which is a 2.66 GHz and 512 MB RAM with a Nvidia GeForce 6200 128 MB Graphics Card. I don't see any problems with the visualisation in my player. However I may have a solution, I experienced this when I just bought my Graphics card. I did not install the drivers yet and when I clicked and held onto the scrollbar in my firefox, it was lagging tremendously bad, it took 2-3 seconds for it to move down. After I installed my graphics card driver, the problem was fixed. I think you should try looking for your graphics card manufacturer and install the driver of that particular model. I am not going to install WMP 11 in my notebook though, in fact I am not going to install anything new from Microsoft (IE 7, Microsoft Office 2007, WMP 11 .... etc) till 2 years after Vista's release so that there not be any unnecessary bugs.

Edited December 22, 2016 by OpaQue (see edit history)

[TripleH13 0]

I have also noticed it beeing slow and it has locked up on me a few times. Microsoft's work has been to great with their new stuff comming out. Even Vista wasn't that great in a lot of peoples opions. Windows Media player 11 had a few small upgrades like media sharing but it still kind of buggy in my opion.

[elrohir 0]

try using a media player that works. vlc is great, even if it doesn't have all the unnecessary bells and whistles that WMP comes with, but at least it works. What do you want the visualisations for in the first place?? You can turn the off, you know...

[quakesand 0]

Guess old computers doesn't support it...

[sachavdk 0]

Hmm. WMP...I like iTunes more. Easier to keep your collection of music, video, podcasts etc organized. Not everytime loading that library. Just one library with links to the songs in the library in the playlists.And the visualization is not that memory-intensive and pretty nice. Very simple.

[laforgej 0]

Sorry it took so long to get back to this form. Thanks for the tip on updating your video driver, I got this computer a few months ago, surprisingly updating the drivers never crossed my mind. And yea I know you can turn off the visualizations but sometimes it's relaxing just to stare at them until you are dizzy. And as for switching media players, I have come to like the WMP 11 interface, and non of the others are are good. I am sure itunes is a good media player, and i hate Microsoft as much as the next guy but I hate apple even more.

[elrohir 0]

i hate Microsoft as much as the next guy but I hate apple even more.

I can't stand itunes either, the way it wants to convert your files all the time... but I still don't see why people want things to look all shiny and stuff... oh well, each to their own trade

[laforgej 0]

Well I updated my video driver; it didn't make a difference.must have something to do with the way the WMP11 works. I am planning on buying a new video card before too long, I am pretty sure that it will fix this problem along with some poor game play I have been putting up with.I finally got a new video card and the problem is gone. But it still confuses my as to why covering just a couple hundred pixels would make such a dramatic performance increase. Nothing like that is visible now, now increase on CPU usage or decrease in quality.

[jlhaslip 4]

I would think it was a ram shortage. There was lots of stuff I couldn't run due to ram being small in my last laptop. This new one with 512 has been no problem with multiple softwares running all at the same time. Especially with the graphics stuff. Just thinking about going in to view the SOTW made my old one slow down.

[michaelper22 0]

I finally got a new video card and the problem is gone. But it still confuses my as to why covering just a couple hundred pixels would make such a dramatic performance increase. Nothing like that is visible now, now increase on CPU usage or decrease in quality.

When put the focus on another window, Windows supposedly gives it more ccomputing power. but that doesn't really explain what the problem is.
I just came up with the idea that maybe since WMP is a 'background' process when not having the focus, it gets more power. I've found background tasks to run faster than foreground ones, like extracting an archive with 7-Zip.

[dave2win 0]

I have a P1 Machine. Since it doesn't support Win XP so I had to install WMP 9 as WMP 10 + doesn't install without WinXP. Well that has an separate dedicated Graphics Card(Well at the time I had bought that PC (1993) there was no onboard graphics cards present. You had to buy them along with your motherboard.) . But still it used to shutter & clutter while the Visualisation is on. But on my latest P4 Box I don't have a dedicated Graphics Card but still it runs gr8. I mean there no shutter bugs no cluttering and my processor is like having 1-5 % Usage!!! I use WMP 11!!!

[iGuest 3]

Same here,but with itunes for XPWindows Media Player 11 Visualization

I have had the same problem with itunes viz's. I noticed that when I scrolled my mouse over it and kept moving, it worked fine, but when I didn't, it lagged like there was no tommorow. This problem became too much and I uninstalled itunes. This has never happened with wmp 11 for me however and I encourage you to contunue searching for a solution.