divx is strange

[crazy glue]

just an interesting little story

i recently formatted my hard drive and reinstalled win98se to get better performance with playback

win98se
16 mb creative banshee
creative sb live value
320 mb ram
350 Mhz amd k6-2
asus p5a super7 mobo
codecs BEFORE: everything I could possibly load (probably the cause of the performance lag)

so before I was playing the fourCC musical chairs game and turning almost everything to mpeg4 to get things to work well

now after the format, it's the reverse, almost everyhting works better if I change it to divx slow

(problems after format: mostly audio, video sync problem - and 99% video played slow with stutters and temporary freezes, audio sounded fine)

go figure

I'm a newbie at the technical side of things and would appreciate some suggestions to some basic faqs on video and audio that could increase in complexity and information

thanks

[Enchanter]

My advice to you: don't change the FourCC codes of different formats to one common code. Simply let the native decoder of each FourCC type work on their respective content.

In addition to that, you might want to give FFDShow a try.

[crazy glue]

thanks for the advice

but for most people, including me, although not beginners, we tend to lack the understanding to set up a system that is both stable and plays everything well;
so we layer all these codecs into the system and since they obviously are not fully compatible with each other, we screw our selves and don't know how or what we did;
by the time we do figure things out we've added, removed (usually partially), and configured so many codecs and software that we have issues one way or another that has no simple solution
and then resorting to changing the FourCC code, which works damn well at least then, seems like a good idea

hence format-hard drive option

but I've found the same is true for buggy software including windows, drivers, etc.;
format and reinstall in a set pattern and things work for me;
a pain to say the least but my system then works

BTW: can anyone point me in the direction of some basic and intermediate information on video and audio
thanks

[Enchanter]

Give FFDShow a try. It is capable of decoding various compression formats, including DivX and XviD. In addition to that, it has excellent image quality output, relatively light on CPU usage and does not seem to suffer from bugs (none that I'm aware of so far anyway).