Testing Stability? Overheating?

[Mekias]

Background:

I've been backing up DVDs using the Big 3 for about a year now. A month ago I started noticing some shaking and general poor quality on my DVDs. It's been getting worse and worse lately.

At first I thought it was my DVD burner. So I took an old backup, put it on my hard drive as an ISO, mounted it, copied the VIDEO_TS to a folder and burned it using my usual process. The backup looks good so I don't think it's the DVD burner.

Now I'm thinking it's a software or general system problem. This got me to thinking about something I started noticing a month or two ago. When running CCE (through DoCCE), my computer has started to get rather noisy. I'm guessing one or both of the fans might be working inefficiently, the computer is heating up and the CCE is having problems encoding.

So I grabbed SpeedFan and CpuBurn to try and test my stability. SpeedFan seems to give me a temperature (between 41 and 43 Celcius) but the fans just say 0 RPM. I ran CpuBurn (burn5 for Pentium 4) on high priority for 10 hours but the computer never got over 51% usage and the heat registered in SpeedFan never went up. The fans never got going either.

Firstly, does it sound like I have a fan/heat problem?

Am I missing something or doing something wrong in using SpeedFan/CpuBurn?

I just download UltimateBootCD and will try some more diagnostics but I'm not a very technical computer person so it's all going to be trial and error.

Any advice is appreciated. I'm a little lost with this stuff.

Thanks

[Sirber]

Shaking and poor quality?

If you rewind a little, is it the *same* shaking? If you pause, does it shakes?

[Mekias]

Well, the shaking isn't really shaking so much as trailing lines around the edges of the people on the screen whenever they move...especially in a action sequence. This makes the overall screen appear to jump around rather spastically. It's clear when the camera is still. These happen in the same spots and it looks to be the same stuff but it's hard to tell.

One other thing was the skips that I'm getting at the same spots. I'll be playing the DVD and it will pause and skip...sometimes a minute or more ahead. It definitely does these at the same spots on my standalone.

What I can't seem to figure out is how they can look fine played on my computer but have so many problems on my stand alone. I think my stand alone is just more sensitive and can pick up these errors but what do I know?

Could it be my media? I bought 200 Ricoh (Fuji) 4x DVD+R's awhile back but I only have about 60 or 70 left. Maybe I had a few bad batches? But then why did the test backup I made from an older DVD the other day work perfectly fine?

This is really confusing me.

[Mekias]

Okay, I just ran DVDInfoPro on the last 4 backups I made. They all said identical. So this sounds like my DVD burner is doing well but I'm not sure if that means that the media is good.

I ran diagnostics on my machine and the hard drive, processor, and memory all seemed to check out but those weren't stress tests.

Gonna try that Prime Number program tonight.

[Mekias]

The Prime program couldn't seem to use more than 50% of my CPU either. It didn't stop after 10 hours of processing but wasn't really stress testing it either.

SpeedFan doesn't appear to be working on my computer so I'm not sure if the temperature of 43 degrees celcius is correct or not.

What I'm going to do now is go through my usual DVD burning process very slowly, either lowering the priority of CCE or underclocking my PCU. Not sure how to do either yet but I should be able to figure it out.

If this works, I'll know it's CCE causing overheating that's been my problem.

If not, well, back to square one.

[Sirber]

The "shaking" is called "Interleace".

http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/plugins/images/de-interlace.jpg

Does it looks like the left picture?

[Mekias]

Yeah, the left picture looks like what I've been getting. Is there anything specific that causes this? Does CCE sound like the culprit?

I ran CCE with a new DVD last night and clicked the "run CCE below normal priority" box in DoCCE. It used between 78-81% of the CPU while working (not sure how much it used previously). I'll finish it up tonight and hope it looks good.

[Mekias]

I finished up my Man on Fire DVD today and tested it on the computer.

I definitely see problems with it.

The start of Man on Fire is very action oriented with a lot of quick cut scenes. All through that section, I see horizontal white lines popping in across the picture. Looking at this original, these aren't there.

Maybe it's some kind of setting that's changed. My DoCCE4U and Scenarist are the original versions I downloaded a long time ago. I do believe, however, that I got a newer version of DoItFast4U some months ago.

I'm wondering if the settings aren't quite the same and are causing DoCCE4U and CCE problems.

I guess I'll check out the DoItFast4U site and see if anything was mentioned. I might need to go back to an older version of that program.

[Mekias]

It appears I've been using an old version of the BIG 3 DVD backup solution. I think I'll try switching to the new version (DoItFast4U, BatchCCEWS & ScenAid) and see if that solves anything.

[Sirber]

That thing in a part of the image, not a compression problem.

Please read here: http://www.doom9.org/video-basics.htm and http://www.100fps.com/