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Help! Xmpeg crashing on pass-2
I am cross posting here because I don’t speak or, more importantly, can’t read / write French. I visited the Xmpeg web page and can’t find any English area to post a problem. It is my hope that one of the regulars here can translate this and communicate my problem to them. This has been a problem since I upgraded my system.
History:
I had a Sony Viao, OK, but a bit slow for this kind of work. It was a Windows 2K Pro., P3 766 Meg. (Over clocked) W/1 Gig. SDRAM. Worked OK but slow. I don’t consider myself a video-processing expert but I am a software engineer and have been programming since 1978. I was getting quite comfortable with this program and had completed about 40 movies. Other than speed I never had a single failure and the results were excellent.
OK, speed; well that was my downfall. The price of systems has fallen steadily for several years and I could finally afford to upgrade. The new system; Custom, Windows 2K Pro., P4, 2 Gig. (Not over clocked) W/1 Gig. RDRAM (400 Meg buss), AGP video, 2 new drives (ATA 100), 7K rpm (1-80 Gig. and 1-124 Gig.), DVD 16x, and CD-RW 48x. After a couple weeks reinstalling my software I finally got around to trying Xmpeg again.
Now the Problem:
Started to do a movie, the program failed almost immediately in the 2nd pass. A fluke? Tried again, and again, and … Well this was no fluke. The program “always†fails at the beginning of the 2nd pass (within the first 2000 frames but once around 40000 frames, could I have used a lower quality sound driver? Can’t remember). Searched this “board†(and others) for a possible solution. Found nothing. I posted on this “board†and after a considerable time got a reply. Someone else had the same problem but no resolution (similar hardware). After some time I surmised that the File System could possibly be at fault (the error suggested disk access). I had configured all my drives as NTFS and although NTFS provides improved access control and security it is at a cost. The cost is overhead. Due to the size of my drives I would notice that there would be intense disk activity (sometimes for minutes) when no programs or processes were doing anything. Could it be NTFS causing the problem? When I suggested this to the person who responded to my post he tried moving his log files to a Fat32 disk and this fixed his problem. Well, for him anyway. I have a single user system so NTFS is of no particular benefit to me. I converted all my drives back to Fat32. No small task when you are moving over 100 Gig of data and programs. Tried Xmpeg again and to my dismay had the exact same results. For those of you who will ask, I have run rigorous tests on all the hardware; the RAM, CPU, Cache (internal and external), AGP and PCI ports, disk controllers and drives.
Now I began searching for other possible causes. The common threads to these possible problems were in 2 categories, sound drivers and iDCT. The only English help I could find was on doom9 and it seems that only 1 DLL is needed and compatible with all CPUs. I did notice, on the Xmpeg site, That 4.5 comes in 2 flavors. My guess at what the descriptions said was that there is a P4 version and a non-P4 version (but then what good is a guess). I removed all the DLLs except that single DLL and Xmpeg said that there was a new driver that it must test. Well I thought that this could have been the problem. But, no. Still have the same failures. As for the sound drivers, I have known about these problems forever and my system does not suffer from this conflict. The problem IS however, related to the sound processing. Here is how I verified this (by accident).
After cleaning up Xmpeg, shutting down all unnecessary programs I tried again. The results were interesting. I ran my debugger on the program while it ran. The 2nd pass failed just as expected (at about frame 1100). These errors are not consistent even though I have been testing with the exact same files and configuration. The debugger showed 2 error messages. The first was ‘Xmpeg, line 0x00000NNNN can’t read memory at address 0x000000NN’. And then ‘Xmpeg has performed an illegal operation, There has been a sharing violation’. OK, well I thought I would try with different filters. Tried all the filters but finally settled on Bressenham. Well the first time I used this there was no sound processing! I tried everything to get this to work but to no avail. I cleared the projects, stopped and restarted the program, rebooted the machine, and reset all the configurations and setups. Still no sound. Tried 5 times but decided to let it run during the last try. Well … To my surprise the 2nd pass completed in about 25 minutes for a 2-hour film (processing at 40+ frames/sec.). The results were perfect, less the sound of course and exactly the computed size for the video portion. Seems to be a problem with combining the video and sound streams. I might be able to find a way to recombine these but I would be at best, ‘a pain in the b**’.
I love this program when it works and would like to get it to work on my new system. If the Xmpeg team wishes I could provide the debugger out put so their engineers can research this issue.
History:
I had a Sony Viao, OK, but a bit slow for this kind of work. It was a Windows 2K Pro., P3 766 Meg. (Over clocked) W/1 Gig. SDRAM. Worked OK but slow. I don’t consider myself a video-processing expert but I am a software engineer and have been programming since 1978. I was getting quite comfortable with this program and had completed about 40 movies. Other than speed I never had a single failure and the results were excellent.
OK, speed; well that was my downfall. The price of systems has fallen steadily for several years and I could finally afford to upgrade. The new system; Custom, Windows 2K Pro., P4, 2 Gig. (Not over clocked) W/1 Gig. RDRAM (400 Meg buss), AGP video, 2 new drives (ATA 100), 7K rpm (1-80 Gig. and 1-124 Gig.), DVD 16x, and CD-RW 48x. After a couple weeks reinstalling my software I finally got around to trying Xmpeg again.
Now the Problem:
Started to do a movie, the program failed almost immediately in the 2nd pass. A fluke? Tried again, and again, and … Well this was no fluke. The program “always†fails at the beginning of the 2nd pass (within the first 2000 frames but once around 40000 frames, could I have used a lower quality sound driver? Can’t remember). Searched this “board†(and others) for a possible solution. Found nothing. I posted on this “board†and after a considerable time got a reply. Someone else had the same problem but no resolution (similar hardware). After some time I surmised that the File System could possibly be at fault (the error suggested disk access). I had configured all my drives as NTFS and although NTFS provides improved access control and security it is at a cost. The cost is overhead. Due to the size of my drives I would notice that there would be intense disk activity (sometimes for minutes) when no programs or processes were doing anything. Could it be NTFS causing the problem? When I suggested this to the person who responded to my post he tried moving his log files to a Fat32 disk and this fixed his problem. Well, for him anyway. I have a single user system so NTFS is of no particular benefit to me. I converted all my drives back to Fat32. No small task when you are moving over 100 Gig of data and programs. Tried Xmpeg again and to my dismay had the exact same results. For those of you who will ask, I have run rigorous tests on all the hardware; the RAM, CPU, Cache (internal and external), AGP and PCI ports, disk controllers and drives.
Now I began searching for other possible causes. The common threads to these possible problems were in 2 categories, sound drivers and iDCT. The only English help I could find was on doom9 and it seems that only 1 DLL is needed and compatible with all CPUs. I did notice, on the Xmpeg site, That 4.5 comes in 2 flavors. My guess at what the descriptions said was that there is a P4 version and a non-P4 version (but then what good is a guess). I removed all the DLLs except that single DLL and Xmpeg said that there was a new driver that it must test. Well I thought that this could have been the problem. But, no. Still have the same failures. As for the sound drivers, I have known about these problems forever and my system does not suffer from this conflict. The problem IS however, related to the sound processing. Here is how I verified this (by accident).
After cleaning up Xmpeg, shutting down all unnecessary programs I tried again. The results were interesting. I ran my debugger on the program while it ran. The 2nd pass failed just as expected (at about frame 1100). These errors are not consistent even though I have been testing with the exact same files and configuration. The debugger showed 2 error messages. The first was ‘Xmpeg, line 0x00000NNNN can’t read memory at address 0x000000NN’. And then ‘Xmpeg has performed an illegal operation, There has been a sharing violation’. OK, well I thought I would try with different filters. Tried all the filters but finally settled on Bressenham. Well the first time I used this there was no sound processing! I tried everything to get this to work but to no avail. I cleared the projects, stopped and restarted the program, rebooted the machine, and reset all the configurations and setups. Still no sound. Tried 5 times but decided to let it run during the last try. Well … To my surprise the 2nd pass completed in about 25 minutes for a 2-hour film (processing at 40+ frames/sec.). The results were perfect, less the sound of course and exactly the computed size for the video portion. Seems to be a problem with combining the video and sound streams. I might be able to find a way to recombine these but I would be at best, ‘a pain in the b**’.
I love this program when it works and would like to get it to work on my new system. If the Xmpeg team wishes I could provide the debugger out put so their engineers can research this issue.