I am not able to improve the frame rate. It is gated by when the Qt is sending me signals (callback). You have to use a Blackmagic Design SDI/HDMI peripheral to get really smooth playout. Otherwise, on my system, I think the playout is a little smoother when using DirectX (ANGLE) as the display method.

How do you select DirectX as the option when you select an external screen? Those options vanish when an external monitor is selected.

Settings > Display Method is only hidden when GPU Processing is enabled because GPU processing requires OpenGL.

Also, I have found that after switching to DirectX and restarting when prompted, it does not always switch properly. You may need to restart again manually. View > Application Log, and scroll down past most of the begin/end lines and look for:

[Info   ] <Mlt::GLWidget::initializeGL> OpenGL vendor "Google Inc." 
[Info   ] <Mlt::GLWidget::initializeGL> OpenGL renderer "ANGLE (

Sadly using DirectX made things worse. Timeline buttons went grey and are acting very funny.

That's not even while using the second monitor.

Your mileage may vary. Both OpenGL and DirectX are high level APIs to big complicated things in the driver, firmware, and hardware. You can file a separate bug about the external monitor framerate issue if you want, but the problem reported here is resolved for next release, and I only track problem per issue report.

That's fine, I'll deal with the frame rate issue, you already said you can't improve it, so there's no need to make another bug report.

What is your GPU BTW? I do not get a lot feedback about the DirectX method.

It's a Radeon 7850, 1GB..

Besides the GUI artifacts, it was still slowish when any second video track is added with say, translucent PNG's (which I use for overlays). Like it can go down to 1fps. I know it's not real time and should drop the frames, but that's excessive in my opinion, because Adobe Premier works blazingly smooth on the same hardware. But I prefer Shotcuts "flow" more, which is why I practically live off of it.

I may be switching back to Linux soon, so I may not be able to test DirectX much, but I'll hold off for now, and create the other ticket if you'd like me to?