Very weird MovieStim3 performance issues on Windows 10

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Previously, MovieStim3 worked much better with Windows than Mac, but this now seems to have flipped. There is specifically an issue with framerates: 60fps videos on Windows are performing drastically worse than they are on MacOS.

My Windows computer is using Windows 10 and has:
AMD Phenom II 3.5GHz
16GB RAM
GTX 970 4GB VRAM

My Macbook is newer, and running Catalina, but the specs are fairly similar if not slightly worse:
2.3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5
16GB RAM
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB

The same exact movie, which is about 8 seconds long, 1280x720 resolution, and running at 60fps, runs smoothly on my Macbook, and absolutely chokes on my Windows machine. I have no clue why, and about a year and a half ago, it was definitely the other way around, particularly when using the SoundDevice library. Now, using PTB, I get great performance on my Mac and bad performance on my Windows machine, and switching to SoundDevice only slightly improves performance on the Windows machine.

30fps movies play pretty well, though better with sounddevice than PTB (however I have a very strange audio setup on my Windows machine that might be contributing to that).

Has there been a major change in MoviePy that I missed or something else that’s messing with PsychoPy’s movie rendering on Windows specifically?

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Update: This is probably the main issue. Running very slow on Windows 10 · Issue #1252 · Zulko/moviepy · GitHub

Which brings me to another question: Is MovieStim or MovieStim2 likely to be any more efficient?

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Not sure that anything changed in previous releases but you could try using the VLCMovie instead - that one had better performance. You’ll be delighted to hear that rendering movies has been given a lot of love by @mdc in the last few weeks and the next release will be comfortably able to render full HD with no problems :slight_smile:

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That’s exciting to hear! Hopefully it still lets me play around with referencing individual frames as well, but I will keep an eye out for the next release and try it again. Thanks!