Short interruptions while playing Realmedia 9 files

[theReal]

I have just converted to encoding all my Simpsons and Futurama TV captures with Real Producer 9 preview. The quality is much better on cartoons than Divx 5.02 at low bitrates (~550 for video) and it's an easy 1-click encoding that is even a little faster than my previous Divx 5 setup (which needed more filters and was in VDub).

So far everything's great, but sometimes the playback is interrupted for a very short moment, a green info-line at the bottom shows up, I think it's the net congestion warning. It's too short to actually read what it says, though...

I read in another thread that somebody already experienced this, but there was no solution for the problem.

Does anybody know a reason for this? Preload-time? Maximum bitrate? Keyframe interval?

I've changed some of these settings, but now I changed back the max bitrate to 2000 (seems to be enough for my encodings, so it doesn't hurt the quality). I set the keyframe interval to 12 (which I suspect are seconds, not frames?) and the preload time to 25. I still get one or two of these little hang-ups in a 22 minute file.


I think it can't be my hardware: T-Bird 1500, 512MB DDRRAM (FSB 150), ATI Radeon 7500 (64MB), 2xWD 60GB 5200rpm drives as RAID 0. HD Tach reports an average read speed of 27.5 MB/s, in Sisoft Sandra the drive gets a rating of 34,000. Of course it is defragmented regularly with O&O Defrag 2000 Pro.
The processor usage for playback of RM 9 is minimal (between 1% and 5%, although this seems very low...)

[atracus]

@theReal

did you set the Tools/Preferences/Connection/Normal and /Maximum settings to "Corporate LAN (10 Mbps)" ?

that helps...

[atx]

[theReal]

Both normal and maximum bandwidth are set to 10mbit.

I tested a few more clips from a DVD (encoded a 6 min long chapter), to make sure it can't be anything that went wrong during capture.

Now it seems that the little breaks appear at the same frames always, and only when the clip has audio.

[atracus]

I had this annoyance at the beginning of my tests with rv9, prob due to the very high bitrate I encoded in (1500+); then, all my rips (ab.10) of full moviez went on a single CD, so the bitrate averages 700-800k and I didn't see any "net congestion" pb's anymore.

How large is ypur rip's bitrate? that might be the annoyance.... try to encodevideo and audio in 2 separate files, thus reducing (by 96k ?) the video rate, and put them together in a .smil for playback... sorry but this is my only guess....

plz lemme know if it worked

[atx]

[theReal]

hmmm, almost seems like this has been a minor playback annoyance. I encoded a new episode of Futurama today, watched it, and it didn't have any problems. Then I watched the episode that I knew had had problems yesterday, but they were gone.
So, a restart of Windows has solved the problem? I hope so.

Although I'm not perfectly happy because I experienced again a very annoying avisynth problem during encoding (see avisynth forum...)

[nordloewe]

@theReal,

i was the one facing this "Net Congestion" issue in other thread.... well, i haven't been able to fix it yet and i have no idea of what is causing it, however i noticed one important thing:

once you burn the file(s) onto a disc, the "congestion" is over! it annoys a lot while the video is played back from the HD, but it vanishes when you play the video from the CD-R. just ignore it for now.

i didn't notice the thing about re-starting the system....i'll pay attention to that next time...

[theReal]

Good to know, I need to try that as well.
Unfortunately, the problem wasn't solved by a restart...

BUT, I found out it occurred much more when I set the maximum bitrate to 3000 instead of 2000 at an average bitrate setting of 610.
So, I set the maximum to 1000 and didn't have any problems anymore. Also, the quality doesn't seem to change for my Simpsons tv-captures, so I just leave the max. bitrate setting at 1000...

[nordloewe]

i always use max=2000000 ou max=9000000 and that makes no difference here in my system. (!) the playback is only fixed after burning the file to a CD. you can also try to copy (or maybe move) your file to another folder and play it back from the new location. whatever you do, rest assured that the file hasn't problems. there's no need to change encoding parameters...

i run Win2K on a P3-700 384Mb RAM.

[theReal]

I tried moving the files, defragmenting the drive - nothing helps in case of a few remaining spots where there is a short interruption (if the green line at the bottom wouldn't appear, you almost wouldn't notice it). And, with a max. bitrate of 3000, the file had this problem about every minute or so, much more than with 2000. With 1000, it seems to be gone...

I'll try the playback from CD soon, I hope it helps also.