Video locking sound continues to play

[Forsaken]

I've searched these boards for a solution, and see lots of threads about video freezing up, but none seem to address my situation. About 20 seconds into the movie the video will freeze but the audio will continue to play. I can search and it will play the correct audio but will still show the frozen frame. If I search before it freezes I get a black video but the sound plays fine. If this is a common problem and has been addressed, sorry I couldn't find a solution.

[jggimi]

Your problem "sounds" to me like insufficient CPU power for playback. Typically people who solve it either find that they've been running too many background tasks (anti-virus software, instant messengers, etc), or they have CPU intensive post-processing features turned on during playback.

Some people have found that changing AVI players can sometimes eliminate these sorts of problems, too. There are many to choose from; if you're using Windows Media Player 7, 8 or 9 ... you might try version 6.4 instead to see if it works any better. It consumes less CPU than it's later versions, and is packaged with every Windows version since Windows 95. The application is called mplayer2.exe.

A number of us use ffdshow -- a playback-only MPEG-4 codec tool -- for DivX playback, rather than using the DivX codec for that purpose; some say it has easier-to-manage post-processing features than DivX, and, in addition, a number of users say it consumes less resources. It's available from Doom9's download page.

[Nel]

What version of DivX are you using? If you try to play back something that was encoded with a newer version than you have then it can do that too.

[nuked]

Does it always freeze in the same place? I've had this problem before. I didn't figure out at the time entirely what caused it and didn't get much help from the divx.com forum. There are a few factors that I suspect but haven't tested much, been meaning to look at it again know that I know more. I have found fixes though. Turn off smooth playback. This has something to do with B-frames, but I could never get out of the div-x guys exactly what it does. There is a quote somehwere on the web page saying that it's good to turn it off for slower processors when using B-frames. Some folks seem to be convinced it's the oposite though, but on pressing noone actually seemed to know what it does. Anyway.. turning it off fixes it, using ffdshow also fixes it. Why sould version matter? Most of the changes in enconding method shouldn't require any changes in the playback method should they? I mean xvid can playback on divx and divx can play back on ffdshow. If diferent encoderes can be used with diferent decoders I would think surely version of the same would be compatible. Mpeg4 is supposed to be standardized isn't it?

by the way, I know for a fact that at least one of my examples where this happened had a mad mux job of ac3 sound. I fixed the mux, I'll go back and see if that solved it, but I doubt it. I'm more enclined to think it has something to do with b-frames or source errors as in this example the source was also pretty scratched up.

[nuked]

by the way... although smooth playback supposedly uses more cpu, cpu usage was NOT my problem. I was decoding on a 2GHz P4 at about 20% cpu load.