green specks all over

[zoli]

hi people,

i have a problem encoding dvd movies into divx no matter what encoder (flask, nandub, virtualdub, xmpeg, framserved or not) or codec (i permutated all the different types of divx codecs) is in use. Low bitrates (under 1000) usually result in most-of-the-time green (although ive seen other colors as well) SPECKS (damn!). These dots are just the size of a dot, they keep showing up and disappearing again, and have a life span of 3-10 seconds. I couldnt find a relationship between KF interval and the frequency these specks show up.

Even if i encode at 1600 kbits/s, i get some specks, though a lot less.

Does anyone have an idea?

z.

[Hemofec]

I have the exact same problem. Have tried everything, all codecs and drivers, and can't get rid of the dots. They appear on most downloaded films, and when I tried to encode a film myself the result was absolutely horrible.

What system do you have? Very few people have this problem it seems, so who knows what is wrong... I suspected my Hercules Geforce3 card, but I don't know.

My system:

Windows XP
Soltek SL-75DRV2 rev 3.5
AMD Athlon XP 1600+
Zalman 5000-Cu cooler (fan blowing)
2x 256Mb PC2100 TwinMOS
1x 256Mb PC2100 Samsung
Hercules 3D Prophet III Ti200
SBLive! Value soundcard
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 soundcard
Realtek NIC

[zoli]

re green specks

hola man,

I thought I was hallucinating and no one else had ever had this problem.

I did some experimenting in the meantime. I found out that bicubic filtering produces less of these specks (than bilinear) and also (I use dvd2avi) an RGB colorspace gives less spots than a yuv one. Also the higher the bitrate, the less of the dots.
Picture cleaning filtering was of not much use either.
This all happens only with div3 codecs. With the project mayo divx 4.12 I succeeded in a clear picture, though if trying not-so-hard, I could still spot some of these specks, though they just flash up and disappear again.
So, on my part, I abandoned this whole nandub stuff and use virtualdub 1.4.8 with a 2-pass encoding with divx 4.12. That gives me satisfactory quality, although you can't set the crispness level, which I would like to nonetheless.

I have a PIII @ 1100 mhz, asus gf2 64, 512 mb ram.

Interestingly, I only seem to have a problem with movies of my own make, no prob with decoding, I mean.

So, anyone any idea then?

z.

[Hemofec]

Problem solved!

As I wrote in my previous post I had the green, blue and red dots in pretty much all DivX movies I watched, not only the ones I tried to encode myself. In fact, even non-DivX movies, e.g. intros of games etc. had green artifacts in it, so I decided to reinstall windows and take it step by step from there.

Unfortunately I'm not a very patient guy, so my reinstall involved plenty of changes, thus I can't be 100% sure what did the trick. Here's what I did:

1) Before reinstalling XP, I removed 1 chip of 256Mb DDR-memory (from 768Mb to 512Mb) since I couldn't manage to run all the ram at CAS2, only CAS 2,5. Removing one chip (out of 3 256Mb chips) fixed that, since this was a different brand than the two other chips.

2) When reinstalling I hit F5 and chose "standard PC", disabling ACPI, which I did to be sure to avoid problems with my 2nd sound-card.

3) After XP was installed I chose NOT to install any VIA-drivers, like 4-in-1 and AGP 4.10. The only drivers I installed was the latest Hercules-drivers for my Hercules 3D-Prophet III Ti 200 +nvreffix.

4) To check if DivX playback was ok now I just installed the 3.11a codec and 4.11, and played a flick I knew to have green dots all over, in The Playa and Windows Media Player. The movie played back perfectly, without any artifacts. Yippi!

So, as you see, this may not be your definite fix, since I can't be sure what was the critical change, but I suspect it was skipping install of the VIA-drivers. I don't know how results are if encoding, and I wonder what this will do with my "infinite loop", BSOD problem when gaming. Time will tell.

[Enchanter]

As far as I know, WinXP has native support for VIA chipsets (It has its own VIA drivers, which are likely to be some version of VIA 4-in-1 drivers).