Playback stuttering

[eee]

: I use my laptop a Dell Latitude CPi, pentium2 400mhz and 128mb ram, win2k as my movieviewer machine. And it seems that won't do anymore. Whenever i try to watch a Xvid encoded movie the movie stutters all the time. I'm using Koepi's latest xvid build and Gdivx as the movie player (since it dosen't use much CPU).

Plz, advice - Do I have to get a more powerful machine to play movies on or are there anything I can do to get the Xvid movies to play more smoothly?

[synchron]

With that PC description I'm surprised you can view any type of Divx, Xvid, Mpeg2 type movie, especially with a win2k kernel (which runs so many services in the background). I have a AMDK6-2 450 and dual boot to Win98 and WinXP and in Win98, smoothness is very borderline with Mpeg-2 and divx. Mpeg-1 is fine.

Synchron.

[samikaze]

I encountered the same issue on my K6-2 950 which is my moviewatching machine. So I don't think it's MHz dependent. I did some experimenting and found a solution.

I tried to open it in DiVX Alpha 5.0.2 & it would give me an error. I downloaded Nic's Binary VXiD codec from divx-digest. I then ran AviC.exe. After selecting the movie, it brought up both fields as "VXiD." I changed both of them to "DiVX" and applied the changes. I normally use WinMP to watch them with, but it did the same stuttering. It does it about once every second just like before. I then tried to open in DiVX Alpha and it played PERFECT! I then went and changed all FourCC's in the files in the series since they were all VXiD's. They all play fine. This doesn't happen to all movies that were made into VXiD, so it must've been from the person that encoded them with.

Hope this helps you out!

(more info on a follow-up post.)

[samikaze]

....continued from last post:

Oh, if you decide to pass the files around in which you changed the FourCC on, I suggest you change them back since different issues happen with different computers.

Another warning. I almost lost the movie I was doing the experiment with because I didn't keep TRACK of what I was doing. So, if you're going to mess with the FourCC, make a backup first and experiment with that one. The original file I was experimenting on made WinMP show a multi-colored bar on top and the rest of the top half green horizontal bars!! I was lucky enough to figure what was changed and how to change it back.

I also have no idea what "FourCC" is. It may be some type of fork info embedded into the file, so be careful just in case.

[khp]

Originally posted by samikaze
I also have no idea what "FourCC" is. It may be some type of fork info embedded into the file, so be careful just in case.

FourCC is short for Four Character Code. or something like that.

All avi files has these. As you probably know, avi files can contain audio and video in many different formats. The FourC codes tell the player which decoder to use.

[Kevin9394]

Thank you so much for your tips regarding using FourCC Changer that I can play the Xvid files.
However, there is no sound during the playback. What should I do ?

Thanks !!

[samikaze]

Hmm, does this happen with all XViD's?
Have you tried different players and different codecs? I bet that's what you need.

If you're able to get a utility to check the info for your movie files (divx-digest.com) they can tell you what format the audio and video are. That way, you may then know which compatible player to use.

I happen to use Windows Media Player or DivX Alpha 5.0.2. I've never really had to try to use any other kind of player yet, but where i get my files may be different where you get yours. I do need to figure out how to play .ogm files (ogg audio embedded in an AVI), but I'll start a new topic for that if I can't figure it out in a week or so.

Thanks KHP for the info! The Four Character Code does make sense because if you use AviC.exe, each selection change has only four letters. That's cool to know that this is what tells the player(s) what codec it needs to use!