"Popping" Noises On Movie Playback (All Players) WinXP

[Yemble]

If you suffer from regular popping and crackling noises during movie playback on ANY software player running under WinXP, then you MAY be suffering from the same obscure problem that was affecting my PC.

After many wild goose chases, I finally tracked the problem down to the "Windows Image Acquisition Service (WIA)". If this service is in a running state during movie playback then the sound problems will occur (at least they do on my PC). The WIA service must be set to a disabled state in order to stop it being started (manual state is NOT sufficient, since Windows will re-start it when any player is launched!).

It is not at all obvious to me why this service is being started in the first place and why it should affect sound output in the way that it does. However, it is clear that you can waste many hours seeking the solution based on false assumptions, eg. that this must be a CODEC or DirectX problem, when in fact it is neither!!!

This problem may only be relevant to certain hardware combinations....

....my rig is as follows:

ASUS A7V (VIA Apollo KT133)
Athlon 950 (O/C @ 1070)
SB Live! Value
Radeon 7500
512Mb RAM
Windows XP + all updates
PowerDVD XP, WinDVD 3.1, ATI Player 7.5.... etc....

Here's hoping this helps someone else out there!

[1 Smelly Fish]

Thank You Yemble, your time searching to find the problem i am sure will help others out heaps.

Cheers

[FlashIFO]

popping winxp

I tried windows xp and I flush it. One of the reason was that I had to much audio problem specialy with compress audio. Almost everybody seems to think that xp is a great software but every one that I know who use it have weird problem with it.

[Alpha1471]

I read about this problem on the net, and one person has claimed the problem to be a PCI video card. He switched to an AGP video card and the popping noises stopped.

So, a PCI sound card + PCI video card + Windows XP seems to be the cause of the crackling sounds. I also heard that ACPI also causes problems, but there's a big debate about that.

[Nielchiano]

I think that this problem has nothing to do with any specific hardware/software.
I think that this occures just because the sound buffer (weather soft/hardware) can not be rifilled in time. I think that this is generaly because something is taking up too much processor power at that given moment.
That can be a service (WIA), or an interupt-chain (PCI-card stuff), or whatever else...

However, all those tips might work, since they all do the same thing, reduce processor demands

Cheers,
Nielchiano

PS: Yemble, you must have a hell of a lot of patience, wow