xvid & divx4.12 playback on older CPUs

[wing1]

I don't have any problem with either of these codecs at the encoding end, because I used 1900+ XP or 1.46Ghz Athalons to do it with. However, there is an issue at playing them back on my traveling laptop which is a 433Mhz K6-2. The Playa refused to even open up the file, and the only thing that will play it is WMP. The playback is bumpy and freezing as if it is caching the files. Playing back on K7 processors are ok. Just wondering if anyone here has experiencing this problem and have any suggestion to fix it.

[Teegedeck]

I don't have any specific knowledge on this one, but don't use the Playa (and I also had problems with the DivX 4.12 codec on my weak little Celeron). Doom9's adivce is always WMP. I'd use BSPlayer - it means very low stress for the CPU.

[-h]

One of the head developers has a K6-x 550 I believe, and it works for him. All I could advise is trying a few different players, and maybe turning off post-processing.

The XviD dshow filter is actually faster than DivX4 too..

-h

[Killah]

I encoded a file in Xvid, resolution was 608x256, but playback on my girlfriends Celeron 500, sucked BIGTIME... I have done a lot of movies, even with higher resolutions, and they worked fine...

[Teegedeck]

Which direct show filter and player did you use on that celeron?

[Killah]

I didn't use the Xvid filter, and I used bsplayer...

[-h]

Some things to remember:

- MPEG quantization is slower to encode and decode than H.263, from memory by more than 10% when decoding.
- (DivX4) Post processing slows decoding by quite a bit.
- The XviD decoder will be faster on that system than the DivX4 one.

But yeah.. trial and error is all you can do in this case.

-h

[wing1]

Thanks for the fast replies ( Don't you just love testing new technologies :))

The resolution I am using is 544x384 and 528x384. No filtering was used on VidX codec 1/30/02 build ( I did not install DS filter ) and the filtering option was set to zero on divx4.12. The players are WMP and BSplayer (tried it out last nite as suggested). It is still doing the same thing. The laptop has a K6-2 433Mhz CPU. The 500Mhz+ K6-x may be the last CPU version of the K6 class, which has double L2 cache, before AMD retired that CPU class. Perhaps that may be the solution, which means I will need to upgrade my laptop.

Nevertheless, I want to see if it is the codec or just the resolution and bitrate that are making the K6 processor choked. So, I re-encoded a short clip from the same movie using Nandub(divx3.11) at the same resolution and bitrate (Quality degraded a little - block noise artifacts exhibit on some scenes) and play it back on the laptop, and it works perfectly on both WMP and BSPlayer.

[Synth]

Somethings to try that may help:

1. Try 4.11 as opposed to 4.12.
2. Make sure post-processing is disabled (set slider all the way to the left)in the divx filter settings.
3. Use zoom player 2.40 for playback.

[Teegedeck]

Hm, the K6-2-CPUs are reknown for bad MPEG2 performance, so MPEG4-playback might suffer from similar effects. You should try the XviD-DSF from Koepi's latest build. It didn't exhibit any problems on my Celeron-based machine. Plus it gives better quality and performance than the DivX-DSF. You have to install and register the filter manually and change the fourcc of the movie to 'XVID'.

[EDIT:] I must correct myself: At very high bitrates and resolutions, XviD-DSF might drop frames. Try it anyhow.

[wing1]

what do you consider as high bitrate and resolution? right now my movie are encoded at 1800kpbs @ 560x400 using cbr-1pass.

[Teegedeck]

I can't tell at what excact bitrate framedrops occured for me, as I used two-pass with an average of 1800 kbps. Could have been 3000 or more kbps in those incidents. Resolution was 720x576.