Movies at weird framerates won't synch to audio

[Chairman_Mao]

Hey all...
This problem has been driving me absolutely nuts for quite a while. Certain divxed movies (notably low quality and under 100 megs) play "too fast". The audio plays fine, but the video plays at warp speed (from the beginning of the file), then pauses after an indeterminate amount of time to let the audio catch up. This happens in WMP 6.4, 7 and ati's file player (in exactly the same way). Changing video cards and updating drivers does not correct this! And its driving me apeshit. Changing the framerate (ie I converted to mpeg-1 stream) causes the audio to stutter (which leads me to think its an interleaving problem). But the part that's really confusing is that, when the divx plays (video in warp speed as I said) the time counter also runs through at warp speed. Any ideas or fixes?

Here's my system:
XP
256 megs 266mhz ddr ram
ASUS a7v266e motherboard
ati AIW radeon

updated drivers across the board

divx5.02 installed. This also happened before divx 5 came out.

The movie I'm playing with right now reports 20 fps in virtualdub (all of the movies with problems aren't encoded by me, but I seem to be the only one with the problem). Any help/idears greatly appreciated!

[benderman]

Ever tried to re-interleave it with VD? Set video and audio to directstreamcopy and save the avi.

[Chairman_Mao]

Yep, I've tried it. Framerate is still 2x or more (then it pauses to let the audio catch up). The time "bar" still thinks its doing warp 2 as well.

If I remember correctly, when I look in statistics in the old media player, the displayed framerate (instead of being, say, 20 fps as vdub states) may go as high as 60fps, but it's not locked! So it'll fluctuate (while playing) between say 55-60. I just checked this - old MP's statistics (on this file) were wildly fluctuating between 30-43 fps EVEN while the video pauses to let the audio catch up. Processor's certainly fast enough (1.467 ghz athlon xp).

Perhaps this is the problem, the fact that the fps isn't locked where it should be (I'm pretty sure its the problem actually... it's been awhile since I tried to fix this, so I'm remembering all the BS)

Also (I said this before I know) the problem only seems to happen with small files (but not all small files)

[Chairman_Mao]

Has anyone else had problems like the one I'm having? Even if you haven't been able to solve it I'd like to hear from you! I'm trying to determine if it could be a bad registry key...

[cswat]

i have a sync problem with older divx3.1 movies 'sometimes'
it doesnt do the hyperspeed but rather the video runs slow. within minutes the audio is 3 to 4 seconds out of sync. havent found a solution.

[UroAlthaehl]

I was having the exact same problem:

Using WMP 6.4 and/or 8.0, RealPlayer One, RadLight, etc. the audio played just fine, but the video played about twice as fast. Using DivX Player Alpha the video and audio were alright. Seeking/Fast Forward/Rewind didn't work in any player.

I should mention that I was trying to encode my own AVIs and that they were of similar size to the ones you mention (about 100 MB). I use Gordian Knot 0.26 and all the tools that come bundled with it. After trying several approaches to solving this problem, I think I finally found out what /may/ be wrong. I encoded the audio at 64 (22050 Hz) constant bitrate as an MP3. This seemed to be causing the problem. When I encoded the audio at 128 average bitrate *everything* worked fine.

Later I read that LAME has problems with bitrates under 128. You may want to look into the bitrate of your audio. If you are able to get your audio to 128 bitrate (48000 Hz worked for me) as an MP3 then things /might/ work fine.

This problem really bugs me too. =|

Good luck,
UroAlthaehl