Distortion fault.

[leevic]

Has anyone ever seen this fault !?!

I copied several divx files over to a number of CDR's to free up some space on my HDD.
On playback they were fine & I had no problems at all.
I have recently decided to watch a few old films etc but I have a really wierd problem affecting playback now.
Across the bottom of the screen ( windowed or maximised ) I have a strange green distortion which looks like the graphic equaliser display seen on Winamp or any Hi-Fi.
Each of it's 'bars' move up & down just like an equaliser but not in time to the audio. The pattern seems random & at its worst can effect 50% of the total screen depth.
I have tried to play the files through several different players & get the same affect.
I tried to copy over the files to my HDD & play them from there but the distorion was just the same !!
I have reinstalled windows & all the players & the effect is the same.
My system is a PIII - 450hz, 128 base RAM with standard video & audio cards.

Any help would be much appreciated as the files affect come close to 8.5GB & I'm only a 56k-er.

TIA

[khp]

Try loading the files into virtualdub.

This sounds like a problem with the a DirectShow decoder filter.

Which player are you using ?
Have you installed divx5 ?, it has been rumored to cause problems with playback of videos created with divx3.11.

[leevic]

Cheers.

I'm still using 3.11a for the time being - will upgrade to 5.0 once I've sorted this mess out.

How to I go about sorting it in VirtualDub - to be honest I've not used it much.

TIA

[techno]

DIVX 5 sux in my opinion anyway.

Do u have enough free system resources? quit some background apps while playing.

u tried playing on a different computer?

What OS u running?

Techno

[leevic]

I'm pretty sure the system resource side is o.k.. I've tried shutting down background tasks & running memturbo to clean the RAM.

The problem is the same on my other PC & one is running '98 & one XP.

A very bizzare one this......@?!$%&!!

[khp]

Originally posted by leevic
Cheers.

I'm still using 3.11a for the time being - will upgrade to 5.0 once I've sorted this mess out.

Damm, blameing divx5 was my first guess for this one. Installing divx5 might not be a good idear in your case, as I said it's know to cause problems with divx3.11 files, and it's a real hog for cpu power.

Originally posted by leevic
How to I go about sorting it in VirtualDub - to be honest I've not used it much.

TIA

Download virtualdub from here

http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/virtualdub.html

Open one of the avi files in virtualdub and press play, all you need to do is check that the problem is also visible in virtualdub.
(trying to narrow down the cause of the problem).

You might also want to try using different players, take your pick from here

http://www.divx-digest.com/software/index.html#players

From what I hear BSplayer and sasami player should be good choices, though personally I prefer good old wmp6.4(mplayer2.exe).

[leevic]

D'oh........same as described above in virtualdub.

I'm also using wmp6.4 as standard but also use the playa & various others ( all the same fault)

TIA

[khp]

OK it's beginning to sound more like a problem with the files, which should not be possible if they worked once and you have not done anything except burning them.

You might try reinstalling the divx3.11 codec but given the fact that this problems appear on more than one computer this probably won't solve anything.

Finally you might try asking in the divx3 forum at www.doom9.net, that's where all the experienced divx3 encoders hang out.

[leevic]

Problem sorted & for all your info !!

After much messing around I found the problem to be with my hardward acceleration for video display.

On both PC's this was set to maximum. I notched it down to 75% with the slider & robert's your father's brother !!!

I suspect the problem is the slow deterioration of my motherboard given the fact that my PC's on 24 /7 downloading & has been for about 6 months now.

If anyone has any idea how I can go back up to max. acceleration without the same problems I would much appreciate it.

You learn something new with every blue screen !!!

.

[khp]

That's great,

Seems strange that both PC would go bad at the same time.

But thank you very much for posting about your solution.

[techno]

Yep, thanks for the info! Kind of u to give us a solution!



Techno

[Enchanter]

To Leevic

It's strange that your hardware is 'disintegrating' as you put it. My own computers (and a few of my friends') are always turned on every hour of every day of every week of every month and so on (Okay, I do turn them off sometimes) and they are still as healthy as new computers. If your hardware is dying, I doubt the problem would be as simple as this. You probably wouldn't even be able to boot up and operate the computer.

Here's a suggestion. Reinstall your drivers to the latest stable version. It helps a lot of times. Otherwise, you can take the radical step and reinstal Windows. This washes out any deep-rooted problems, especially if you haven't done this for a very long time.

[Ndb]

"I have reinstalled windows & all the players & the effect is the same."

I think he took the radical step

[leevic]

Yup, sure did.

I cleaned down my main pc with a completed format & tried '98, ME & XP with the same frustrating results.

I agree it's unusual but apart from my above solution nothing else seemed to help at all.

If any one has any thoughts I'd much appreciate hearing them as with my acceleration limited to 75 % the full screen quality of some of the encodes is very poor.

TIA

[Ndb]

Do both your systems use the same graphics card or graphics chip?? (i.e. nVidia, ATi etc, Matrox, Kyro etc)

It's the fact that it happens in full screen and windowed playback that has me that has me thinking that <b>khp</b> is close with DirectShow filter problem.

You state standard video and audio cards, is the video an onboard one or a seperate card??

I have experienced some older onboard graphic cards not agreeing with higher than DirectX 6 and causing graphical glitches.

Normally though you would notice this in the normal running of Windows as things like bad desktop refresh etc (i.e. you close a popup and the graphic stays there)