Offline animated wallpaper eventually slows to a crawl then stops

[Ghost]

On windows 11, every time I create a wallpaper, the wallpaper runs fine until several hours. It eventually slows to a crawl then just stops animating. I see no performance hit in my task manager and wallpaper engine is fine. Any idea what can be causing this?

[Tim]

What do you mean by "offline animated wallpaper"? A scene you created in the editor, a video wallpaper you have imported or something else?

Can you run our scan tool and share the log file it creates as explained here:

https://help.wallpaperengine.io/en/debug/scantool.html

[Ghost]

A scene I created and then added to wallpaper engine, I didn't use the editor in wallpaper engine.

info txt https://pastebin.com/dw4P7Cwg

[Tim]

Video wallpapers are rendered by Windows itself. We have no other reports on Windows 11 like this but whatever it is, it must be somewhere in the video rendering process which is out of our control. What resolution, frame rate and video codec are you using using? Try using a different codec (H.264 should be the most reliable. If you are already using it, try tweaking the encoding settings).

You can also try and see if switching to LAV with DirectShow helps on your system:

https://help.wallpaperengine.io/en/videos/lav.html

if the issue persists even with LAV, it's probably some issue in the Nvidia drivers in combination with Windows 11.

[Ghost]

I'm sure its my encoding because other wallpapers work just fine, i'll try out some different render settings, maybe 60 fps is too much?

[Tim]

60 FPS should not be an issue as you can find it rather commonly on Wallpaper Engine and I think we would have received more reports by now if this was causing problems. You could try some random 60 FPS video wallpapers from the Workshop and see if they cause any issues for you for example. With these types of issues it could be any parameter of the video file though. Try re-encoding your video with a third-party tool like Handbrake and try similar settings as you are using right now:

https://handbrake.fr/

[Ghost]

It was definitely my encoding, working now after using handbreak, thank you!

[Ghost]

Okay, so the problem comes back after some time, no matter what encoder I use and even while using other wallpapers that people have created.

It has to be a windows 11 issue because I have never had this happen on windows 10. I'm using all the same programs I did and I even disabled every overlay to see if anything conflits with wallpaper engine.

I thought it might be the latest nvidia drivers but I rolled back to 472.12 (was using it in windows 10) and still the problem persists.

[Biohazard]

The video player is both part of Windows and the graphics driver so I'm afraid there is nothing more we can do, it cannot be done in a different way for Wallpaper Engine without losing both licensing and hardware acceleration. The driver and Windows just need to work fine.

If you want to report this to either Microsoft or Nvidia we can help you with that and share relevant links or information, but something like this cannot be reported by us as a generic issue, since they need your system specs and might need to ask you specific questions or even have you try something out.

[Ghost]

Yeah, I will be reporting it to them both, just wanted to leave that last comment in case anyone comes across this thread in the future with a similar problem.

[雪花牌电视机 SnowTV]

Having this exact problem, not sure if the wallpaper I'm using is "offline" or not, I just favorite them and start to use. It will happen about once a day, and I have to open the main window, switch to another one and switch back and it goes back to normal, then after sometime it will stop again. Rinse and repeat...

Just disabled all the "pause" settings so it'll run forever regardless, will see if that helps.