Choppy video playback

Jynio

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 6, 2004
Messages
232
Hi,

I'm running a P4, 2.8, overclocked to 3.3, with a 1gb of corsair xms 4000 running at 1:1, 9800 pro videocard, asus p4c800-e deluxe motherboard.

The majority of the time video plays fine without any problems. I have a few video clips which were created in microsoft dv avi format, and for some reason they playback choppy, skip a lot, and hang my computer.

I've tried running these in every program I could think of, media player, winamp, divx, windvd, etc, and they all have a similar problem. I've also tried using various codec packs, nimo, k-lite, etc and once again, nothing fixes it.

The files are roughly 500mb and about 2 minutes long. When I open them, I checked performance, and nothing is loaded, into ram, could this be any problem?

My main drive is a 74gb raptor, with a 250gb for storage. I've tried the file on both drives, and the problem still continues.

When playing these videos at school, they run fine, or on a friends computer, 2.53ghz, and 512 ram, they run perfect as well.

Any idea what my problem could be?

Thanks for any help.
 
I suspect your problem is 100% software, 0% hardware actually. Personally, I'm inclined to blame the video codec. Codecs often get conflicts and such and just about anything can potentially happen when they do, though I will admit I've never seen a system actually completely hang, just crash the video player.

The thing is, those codec packs don't usually cover microsoft dv. Maybe one of them does, I don't know, but, it seems to me like there's a good possibility that installing all of those has done no help whatsoever. Also, have you made sure to cleanly uninstall previous packs before doing that? The thing is, codec packs have a tendency to cause all sorts of problems, so in the future you want to avoid them when you can. What I'd suggest that you try doing is uninstall all of them, find the individual drivers you need including perhaps some alternative ms dv if there even is one and then reinstall them all individually from the latest versions.

Beyond that, I really don't know. I mean, if only the one type of video is crashing, obviously your system is stable. I suppose if all else fails, you might try to convert the files to a safe format. Typically conversions done in something such as virtualdub will not crash once you get the whole thing started running, though it may potentially somewhere in the process before it and it's not impossible that it could, just that I haven't seen many do it even when they crashed everything else of mine. If you do such a thing, I'd recommend using huffyuv if you need quality as it's completely lossless so won't harm the quality if the videos any. If even that doesn't work, the only other thing I could say is maybe try the VLC player which has most of it's decoders built in, but, even that probably would end up using windows to decode what sounds to me like a pretty proprietary format (microsoft has a history of providing next to nothing for people to work with when trying to directly support anything with the assumption that if windows can do it we don't ever need anything else.) I don't think it'd do any good, but, you might try running GSpot and identifying just which file(s) claim the MS DV codec so you can maybe see if there are any obvious conflicts. You'll have to know or at least guess the name of the thing, and even then you may not see anything of any use, but, no harm in looking.

BTW, how the heck are those files 500MB for a mere two minutes? Lol, that doesn't do very much compression at all does it...
 
Well, they're meant for image quality for being scene on tv and in theatres, and also need to be in microsoft dv avi, which doesn't help in terms of compression.

Thanks for the detailed reply, hopefully I can get this fixed. I'll probably end up formatting this week, after all it's been almost a year, and I've installed all sorts of drivers/codecs throughout the past months.
 
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