Mouse speed / mouse preferences behave differently depending on whether Input Director is the foreground window

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Mikage

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May 8, 2026, 9:15:32 PMMay 8
to Input Director
Hello, my name is Mikage.
I’m Japanese, and since I’m not very good at English, I’m using a translation tool.
I apologize if anything sounds unnatural.

I recently discovered Input Director and am impressed by how it outperforms other similar solutions in many ways.
Thank you so much for developing and releasing such wonderful software.

There is just one thing that isn’t working properly. I’ve tried various solutions, but since I couldn’t resolve it, I decided to post here.

This concerns the behavior when the “Use this system’s mouse preferences when directing system” setting in the “Director Preferences” tab is turned off (unchecked).

When I turn it off in the settings screen, it produces the excellent results I expected.
However, when the Input Director UI on the Director side (such as the settings window or the menu that appears when right-clicking the taskbar icon) is no longer in the foreground, the mouse cursor movement on the client becomes the same (or nearly the same) as when “Use this system's mouse preferences when directing system” is turned on.
The moment I bring the UI back to the foreground, the movement returns to what I expected.
This behavior occurs on all clients when multiple clients are connected.

I have verified the following:

- Deleted settings, uninstalled, then reinstalled. Tested with only one client, changing only the relevant setting. The issue was reproduced.
- Downgraded from version 2.4 to 2.3. The issue still occurs in 2.3.
- Exported the settings file using the export command and checked the contents. The relevant setting was set to false, as expected.
- Restarted all PCs. No effect.
- The “Ease cursor movement between displays” setting in Windows 11 is turned off.

The PC configurations are as follows:

- Director: Windows 11 Pro, 2 displays, 3840x2160 + 2160x3840, Windows scaling set to 200%, Windows mouse settings at default
- Client 1: Windows 11 Pro, 1 display, 3840x2160, Windows scaling set to 225%, Windows mouse settings at default
- Client 2: Windows 11, 1 display, 1440x2560, Windows scaling set to 175%, Windows mouse settings at default

Please let me know if there is any other information you need.
I am a software engineer and a Windows app developer, so I believe I can handle technical details to a certain extent.

Thank you in advance.

Shane

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May 11, 2026, 7:25:00 PMMay 11
to Input Director
Hi,

This is an existing issue at the moment. Microsoft made a change in Windows 11 so that applications that subscribe to low-level input events (which Input Director does) and are running in the background only receive a summarised set of events rather than a complete input stream. This issue is exacerbated if a high resolution/high polling mouse is attached to the Director system. 

I am working on a couple of workarounds at the moment.

Regs,

Shane.

Mikage

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May 11, 2026, 10:06:36 PMMay 11
to Input Director
Hello.
Thank you for your reply.
I understand that this is due to Windows 11 specifications.
Thank you very much for explaining the details.

Jolly

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May 22, 2026, 3:39:59 PMMay 22
to input-d...@googlegroups.com
Do you know which version of windows this changed in? 
I already have ID set to run under high priority. 

This might explain why I was getting inconsistent results trying to test ID mouse movement.  - seems like pointer precision wasn't getting applied.  

Was also noticing that under dynamic updates, sometimes it'd get high res mouse movement updates- avging out to 1000 hz, other times itd be barely 150hz.
Any chance of getting a ID version with a fixed 1000hz network send setting?

-Jolly


director machine.png
500hz.png
dynamic slow.png
dynamic fast.png


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