AVC/XAVC-S issues in VP15/16? Try disabling so4compoundplug.dll!

NickHope wrote on 8/29/2017, 12:58 AM

VEGAS Pro 15 has a new decoder, so4compoundplug.dll that reads AVC and XAVC-S files. I think the intention is that it will also handle m2ts and perhaps other formats in the future.

The benefits of this new decoder include:

Decodes Panasonic GH5 10-bit 422 AVC footage
Decodes JVC YUV 4:2:2 AVC footage
Decodes iPhone/iPad AVC footage (without requiring Quicktime)
(I guess) Scope for improved performance

However some negative issues are attributed to this new decoder. In particular:

XAVC-S slow loading and high RAM usage
Stereo audio decodes as dual mono (e.g. Nvidia ShadowPlay)

If you experience any such issues, or any other issues with AVC behavior in VP15 that you did not experience in VP14, then first check which decoder plugin is being used by looking at the "Plug-In" section at the bottom of the VEGAS file Properties window (accessed by right-clicking on a file in the VEGAS Explorer window then choosing "Properties", or right-clicking on a video stream on the VEGAS timeline then choosing "Properties" then "General" tab):

If the troublesome files are getting decoded by so4compoundplug.dll then you can try disabling it as follows:

Hold down the SHIFT key while opening Options > Preferences
Click the Internal tab
In the field "Show only pref containing:" file type "So4" without the quotes
Set "Enable So4 Compound Reader for AVC/M2TS" to FALSE.
OK > Restart

With luck, VEGAS will now instead attempt to use an alternative decoder such as compoundplug.dll to decode your files, which may solve the issue.

Bear in mind:

This may break some of the new format support such as iPhone and 10-bit 422 GH5 files, and that the bugs with so4compoundplug will probably be fixed in future updates, so don't forget that you've set this because you'll probably want to un-set it in the future!
Your audio waveform previews (stored in .sfk files) will be rebuilt when the codec is disabled or re-enabled, which may make it appear that your projects are opening more slowly. But once the waveforms are re-built, projects will open more quickly.

Note that in VEGAS Pro 15 builds before 261, more formats were decoded by so4compoundplug, and this caused the following issues:

Much lower fps playback of some AVC files including some GoPro, DJI & Xiaomi Yi files
Slow rendering of video event thumbnails for those files
Garbled audio decoding (also here)
Slower opening of large projects containing many AVC files (Largely fixed in VP15 build 216)

Edit 1st December 2017: In VEGAS Pro 15 build 261, troublesome GoPro, DJI and Xiaomi Yi formats have been put on a new "blacklist" that makes them fall back by default to opening with the compoundplug decoder, which generally works very well with these formats. Read the thread for the full story...

Edit 6th June 2018: In VEGAS Pro 15 build 361, the blacklist was made into a separate, editable xml file. In this build the file needs to be moved in order for it to work. Other formats such as XAVC-S can also be added to the blacklist if necessary by editing the file (with great care). Full details in this post.

Edit 3rd September 2018: From VEGAS Pro 15 build 384, so4_blacklist_vp15.xml is placed by default in C:\Program Files\VEGAS\VEGAS Pro 1X.0\ where it can be read, so there is no longer any need to move it.

Edit April 2024: The default reader for AVC files in VEGAS Pro 21 build 300 onwards is the new mxcompoundplug, and the So4 blacklist feature was removed. The feature is available in versions 15 to 20. The so4compoundplug reader can still be disabled by renaming the C:\Program Files\VEGAS\VEGAS Pro 21.0\FileIO Plug-Ins\so4compoundplug folder.

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Comments

NickHope wrote on 10/18/2017, 3:34 AM

I am having problems with garbled /crackling audio played back on the timeline from Sony A7S XAVC-S codec.

Is it still recommended to disable the so4 decoder? I can see where to do that, but don't see "Show only pref containing:" file type "So4" under the Internal Preferences tab.

@karma17 Yes, still recommended for build 216. Just type "so4" into that box at the bottom, to filter the number of preferences shown. I don't know why that wouldn't work. If it doesn't work then you can just scroll through the preferences until you find the one you want.

karma17 wrote on 10/18/2017, 4:37 AM

Oh, thanks! I see it now. Solved the problem...for now.

marc-s wrote on 11/10/2017, 12:58 PM

This issue also affect preview to second monitor function. Could not get it to work until I made the change. Now event pan/crop is very sluggish. Come on Magix... Vegas 15 is now slower to work in than Vegas 13.

NickHope wrote on 12/1/2017, 12:44 AM

Here's the deal with so4compoundplug in VEGAS Pro 15 build 261 as I think I understand it...

Some AVC formats including some some GoPro, DJI & Xiaomi Yi files have an internal irregularity that makes them decode poorly with VP15's new so4compoundplug.dll decoder. While the developers work to resolve this issue for a future update, they have put these formats on a "blacklist" that makes them fall back to opening with the compoundplug.dll decoder, which generally works very well with these formats. This means that in most cases there *should* no longer be a need to manually disable the so4compoundplug decoder, and many users could now safely set that setting back to the default TRUE (if the update didn't do that automatically), giving the benefit of wider format support.

I will unpin this post for now, as it's not longer as crucial as it was before build 261, but disabling the so4compoundplug decoder is definitely still something to try when troubleshooting AVC performance/stability, so I'll make sure the post is linked from the FAQs. [EDIT: I was a bit hasty. Pinned again!]

I'll also remove these issues from the "known issues" post, as to all intents and purposes they appear to be fixed by the change of decoder.

In the unusual case that someone might want to disable the "blacklist", it can be done with a new internal preference (accessed by pressing SHIFT when clicking "Preferences") called "Enable Blacklist for So4 Compound Reader", which defaults to TRUE:

Peter_P wrote on 12/1/2017, 1:00 AM

This means that in most cases there *should* no longer be a need to manually disable the so4compoundplug decoder, and many users could now safely set that setting back to the default TRUE (if the update didn't do that automatically), giving the benefit of wider format support.

At least with larger XAVC-S UHDp30 100Mbps footage project I still had big trouble with the so4compoundplug decoder enabled and needed it to disable. May be other footage that is on the black list will not lead to these problems.

An easy way to see, if the used footage is on the 'black' list is to inspect the property media.

NickHope wrote on 12/1/2017, 1:12 AM

The issue reported on this thread by @mickhardy, whereby a file could not be deleted by a script after being read by so4compoundplug is fixed (and not documented in the release notes).

NickHope wrote on 12/1/2017, 1:45 AM

@Peter_P What sort of trouble exactly? Is it similar or worse than the trouble with previous releases of VP15? I'll make sure that gets added to the OP of this thread and also the known issues thread.

Also, there still exists the issue whereby 2 x stereo tracks decode as 4 x mono tracks for some formats that are still decoded by default by so4compoundplug. In particular, Nvidia Shadowplay footage. Can still be fixed by manually disabling so4compoundplug.

Peter_P wrote on 12/1/2017, 2:17 AM

@Nick Hope
with my footage I have two problems. First is the loading time of a quite large UHDp30 XAVC-S project : with so4compoundplug disabled it takes 35 seconds until the first reaction is seen in the timeline. With this dll enabled it takes 1 minute and 15 seconds.
Second is the RAM usage during preview. This project normally uses 5 to 6GB of RAM. While previewing with so4compoundplug enabled it grew >15GB and crashed on my 16 GB RAM system.
If there would be a way to add this kind of footage to the ‘blacklist’ I think this could help at this time.

mickhardy wrote on 12/1/2017, 3:34 AM

Thanks Nick. I can confirm this release appears to have fixed all my issues, which were far wider reaching than the simple version I presented here. Cheers to the developers. I can finally release my application.

NickHope wrote on 12/1/2017, 5:26 AM

@Nick Hope
with my footage I have two problems. First is the loading time of a quite large UHDp30 XAVC-S project : with so4compoundplug disabled it takes 35 seconds until the first reaction is seen in the timeline. With this dll enabled it takes 1 minute and 15 seconds.
Second is the RAM usage during preview. This project normally uses 5 to 6GB of RAM. While previewing with so4compoundplug enabled it grew >15GB and crashed on my 16 GB RAM system.
If there would be a way to add this kind of footage to the ‘blacklist’ I think this could help at this time.

@Peter_P Thanks. I've re-written the OP of this thread, and also added this XAVC-S issue to the "known issues" post. Did you ever report this? I think it might be worth doing so, especially with that clear numerical data to back it up.

Peter_P wrote on 12/1/2017, 5:32 AM

Did you ever report this? I think it might be worth doing so, especially with that clear numerical data to back it up.

@Nick Hope

Yes, with lots of details. Development is aware and working on it.

marcel-vossen wrote on 12/1/2017, 5:50 AM

Does this new release fix the terrible lagging when opening any windows like FX or TXT windows in vegas 15?

Peter_P wrote on 12/28/2017, 1:31 AM

And also no problem with all the same settings and a 4K project with 4K AVC-S source , MediaInfo of the source is

@Cornico

It was improved a bit with B261, but to make a real test you have to use many XAVC-S clips in the timeline, Save it as a project and try loading some hundred clips in the project. You can not test this with only a few clips. The available RAM is significant too.

VidMus wrote on 1/26/2018, 7:43 AM

For the first time, I finally finished a project in Vegas Pro 15 without any problems.

wwjd wrote on 3/23/2018, 8:42 AM

This TOTALLY fixed my VP15 issues. Probably should be a switch to turn ON IF one has certain types of files. Better yet, fix the routine that selects which file type is decoded how.

NickHope wrote on 3/23/2018, 9:33 AM

This TOTALLY fixed my VP15 issues. Probably should be a switch to turn ON IF one has certain types of files. Better yet, fix the routine that selects which file type is decoded how.

@wwjd What format of media and how was it created?

wwjd wrote on 3/23/2018, 10:07 AM

This TOTALLY fixed my VP15 issues. Probably should be a switch to turn ON IF one has certain types of files. Better yet, fix the routine that selects which file type is decoded how.

@wwjd What format of media and how was it created?

GH4 camera, C4K, .MP4 file. No clue about file formats beneath that name, but followed the instructions, and it was used, disabled, and seems perfectly fine now.

NickHope wrote on 3/23/2018, 10:55 AM

@wwjd Question from the developers: If you have QSV available on your CPU, can you please try setting "Enable Hardware decoding for So4 Compound Reader" to FALSE instead of "Enable So4 Compound Reader for AVC/M2TS" and see if that also fixes your issues.

wwjd wrote on 3/23/2018, 2:39 PM

I will check on this Tuesday. Visiting family all weekend

Jakob wrote on 3/23/2018, 4:10 PM

Built 321 has slightly improved my work with Vegas 15. But it still keeps crashing. And the culprit seems to be the so4compoundplug.dll. Problem : I can not disable it as part of my footage is JVC YUV 4:2:2 AVC.

On bigger projects (> 45mn, mixture of still images, HD and 4k footage) it is still virtually impossible to make a full render. Memory usage keeps going up until at one point (random) the render is stuck. When working on the timeline, something similar happens. RAM is slowly used to its maximum and almost never freed. System starts to stutter and from time to time crashes when having to load some heavy 4k footage.

I have been using Vegas since 2005 mainly for TV shorts and have been mostly happy with it. But I would really wish that one of the main decoder dll for Vegas, pinpointed as a problem for more than half a year, be fixed!

@ Nick Hope : I’m still on windows 7 and have kept on using the old media manager (slightly adapting the Microsoft sql db) to manage my own footage but also thousands of historical stills and archive films. Have you been able to keep it running on the last updates of Windows 10 ?

NickHope wrote on 3/24/2018, 12:34 AM

@ Nick Hope : I’m still on windows 7 and have kept on using the old media manager (slightly adapting the Microsoft sql db) to manage my own footage but also thousands of historical stills and archive films. Have you been able to keep it running on the last updates of Windows 10 ?

@Jakob No, I've had to disable Windows Updates and keep my machine at Windows 10 version 1511. When I'm finally forced to move on for whatever reason, I will probably try to run a legacy version of Windows in a virtual machine (on an up-to-date Windows PC) so I can access Media Manager. Thread is here: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/windows-10-anniversary-ed-n-broke-my-media-manager--103055/

Wolfgang S. wrote on 3/24/2018, 4:02 AM

For me it runs on the latest version of Win10.

peter-ilyk wrote on 3/24/2018, 6:43 AM

I have had a lot of problems with VP15 constantly hanging (I'm using W10 and was using build 261). I upgraded to build 311 today and at the same time disabled both the So4 compound reader AND the So4 Hardware decoder. Haven't had one hang since then - even on a 90 minute project. Not only that, all the transitions now play smoothly on the timeline, whereas they used to often stutter. Not sure whether it was upgrading to build 311 from build 261 or disabling both the So4 compound reader and hardware decoder (or both) - but either way, VP15 now works like I want it to (and as it used to do in earlier versions).

Wolfgang S. wrote on 3/24/2018, 11:05 AM

I would not be able to disable the so4 plugin, since I need that for my EVA1 10bit footage. But I have also no hangs here, for whatever reason. Works fine.

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