DivX 5 Pro drives me crazy... HEEEELP!!

[marc_albero]

Hello, you all Masters Of The Ancient Art Of Encoding!

It is not my true desire to disturb you with the passions of a simple human newbie, but pain is stronger than me, and thus I must turn to you tonight.

Ehem...my gear: PIII @800MHz, 256 Ram, Main Board Elite Group P6BAP-Me, GeForce2 MX TV-Out, Seagate Barracuda IV 60GB, Hauppauge WinTV PCI.

I have installed DivX 5 Pro in my system, and it is driving me crazy. Some points:

1) I see crazy artifacts, which sometimes appear, and sometimes not.
These artifacts seem to me like an overlay-related problem. Some regions of the picture, apparently having all the same (dark) color (that's the only common factor I thing they could share), appear on screen with other, much lighter colors. I am not completely sure, but they could be transparent, and that colors could be actually the picture on my window desktop. That's why I think it's an overlay-related issue.

It's even more complex: they appear sometimes, and they don't appear other times. They appear sometimes in Windows Media Player, and it seems they won't ever appear in DivX Player or BSPlayer. The playback settings in the decoder (smooth playback, overlay extended, YUV decoding, etc...) don't seem to have direct influence on this issue. It can appear when they are on, or when they are off, or with any other combinations (overlay off and rest on, etc).

Crazy, huh?

2) Playback speed: DivX Player plays DivX5Pro contents slowly, Windows Media Player plays it sometimes right, sometimes slowly, and BSPlayer seems to play it always fine... Of course the quality settings of the decoder are all set at minimum.

Moreover, the playback settings of the decoder (smooth playback, etc) don't seem to have any effect on speed, according to the task manager (average CPU usage of 75% always), whatever player is used.


Could anybody please help me? In the threads I see lots of shining happy people celebrating how good is DivX 5 Pro, and I just get sad.


Thanx, Marc

[avih]

although the latest version of divx i used was 4.11, i can try to help by isolating the problem.

1. to check whether the artefacts are endocing related or playback only related, open the file with virtualdub, and check for the artefacts. if you don't see them it's a playback only problem, which is a good thing.

2. to see if the problem is with the divx dshow filter, try playing your files with ffdshow (ffdshow can override divx filter association, but at the worst case, u can just uninstall divx). you might wanna try with clips without qpel and gmc, since i don't know how well ffdshow supports these (it claims it does, but i've heard contradicting reports).

3. if possible, try playing your clips on another machine. again if possible, same OS as yours and also different OS.

cheers and good luck
avi

[metrum_eng]

avih gave some solid advice to check in V-dub if you see any artifacts. Regarding playback issues I can strongly recommend you visit www.powerdivx.com and download their free power divx player 3.12 next generation. By far it is the best divx player in my opinion.

I just switched from encoding my divx movies from divx 4.11 to the new divX 5.02 pro. I follwed TheWEF's guide to a tee (Thoroughly) and I've had good luck. I personally don't have too much time to "experiment" with the various 5.02 pro filters so I just stick with what is recommended thusfar on the current guide and it seems to work pretty good. I also just made my first ONE CD encode (normally I do 2 for quality) but with the divX 5.02 codec, it made a hell of nice looking encode with only a 1 cd target filesize. (90 minute movie)

Good luck, hope you can figure it out.

[theReal]

With your Geforce 2MX, make sure the videos have a width and height divisible by 16. Maybe 8 is enough, but I had problems with the height divisible by 4 when I still had a Geforce 2MX. I think there are patches for that problem, but I've never used them.

Then, try to set your desktop color depth to 32 bit (or 24 bit), I've heard that this helped many people whith overlay problems during playback.

Also, I made the same experience as you: the options like smooth playback don't seem to do anything for the cpu usage...