RV9 causing total system freeze

[Kb_cruncher]

I just encoded my first rv9 movie using x2real 0.4 (build 3052/release).everything went fine but as soon as i try to play the file my system totally locks up.I know its not the player because i have tried both mpc and realone on other file types and they work fine.Any ideas?

[Kb_cruncher]

Update:
I sometimes get a blue screen that says ati2dvag file is the culprit(i have an ati radeon 8500 on winxp,latest drivers).Apparantly the driver gets stuck in an infinate loop.I also found this http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/2366/ which sugests i,m on the right track.Has anyone else witha radeon had this kind of problem before?

[karl_lillevold]

Hi there, you are right, ati2dvag is an ATI driver. If you go over the last couple of pages of the RealVideo 9 Information thread, you will see an ATI bug being discussed. This is with Catalyst 3.0 and 3.1. I have not seen it cause the notorious blue screen though. A new version should be out shortly. Hopefully they will have fixed RV playback by then. Anything else about your system : dual CPU? Is the ATI an All-In-Wonder? Do you have 1394 on the motherboard (there are bad problems with ATI AIW and certain motherboards with 1394 support)?

[Kb_cruncher]

I have a radeon 8500LE on an Iwill xp333 and an xp1600+,no firewire onboard.Just updated to Catalyst 3.1 drivers which has solved the blue screen problem but rv9 video is mixed with pink and green "fuzz" or just solid flickering green.Playback is possible if i throttle off on hardware acceleration to the notch that disables directdraw and direct3d but playback is very choppy and blocky.

[karl_lillevold]

Glad to hear the blue screen has gone away with the driver upgrade.

However, the flicker with pink and green is the known ATI driver bug in this latest version. It should be resolved in the new version (3.2?) due out any day now. It will also go away by stopping and starting the video.

[Sirber]

Viva NVidia. It's problem-free!

[31 Flavas]

Originally posted by Sirber
Viva NVidia. It's problem-free! Er... nvidia isn't problem free. One humongous problem for them is no longer being #1!

They are becoming quite a lot like 3dfx! Hehe! :p

Sorry, couldn't resist teasing :)

[Kb_cruncher]

Nvidia is'nt a drop in the ocean compared to ati for tvout and i would'nt pit a GeForce against a 9700Pro,would you?:D

Thanks for the headsup Karl.I will be sure to keep an eye out for the 3.2 drivers.The 2 second of RV9 i did see before the blue screen looked awsome to me.

[mf]

"RV9 causing total system freeze" --> "What the hell do you expect?" :p

[31 Flavas]

ATI releases Radeon 9800 Pro! (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDM5)

No paper launch here. Are you ready for MORE? Suck it nvidiots! :p

I'm just teasing, no flamewar ok? :)

[Kb_cruncher]

Actually MF there is quite a coincidental comparison here.Divx is like 3dfx then came along XviD(Nvidia)now we have RV9(ATI).I guess its just evolution,everything has to be superseded somtime;)
Please don't get me wrong,i have used XviD exclusively since it arrived and still do.

[mf]

Originally posted by Kb_cruncher
Actually MF there is quite a coincidental comparison here.Divx is like 3dfx then came along XviD(Nvidia)now we have RV9(ATI).I guess its just evolution,everything has to be superseded somtime;)
Please don't get me wrong,i have used XviD exclusively since it arrived and still do.
DivX3 is still unsurpassed by DivX4/5 and other codecs. The only codec to surpass DivX3 is XviD. And there's nothing that can compete with XviD.

[Sirber]

@31 Flavas

Lets war!!!! :devil:

@mf

RV9 is better than XviD in some movies, like The Messenger on 1 CD, and animes.

@31 Flavas

I'm joking :p

[karl_lillevold]

:eek: I wish this thread could be re-named to
ATI driver causing total system freeze

[mf]

Originally posted by Sirber
@mf
RV9 is better than XviD in some movies, like The Messenger on 1 CD, and animes.
Please tell me you're not serious about the anime. Realvideo is a blurry hell, and if anime doesn't like one thing then it's blurriness. I will laugh my balls off the day a fansub group starts releasing in RV9.

[31 Flavas]

Just curious, did you see doom9's codec shootout that included RV9?

[mf]

Originally posted by 31 Flavas
Just curious, did you see doom9's codec shootout that included RV9?
Yes I did. That, and other people's experiences (I'm not going to install it myself since the last time I installed anything with a name that started with "Real"(that was in 1999 btw) I got spyware) is what I base my judgement on.

[karl_lillevold]

Please, everyone knows about the bad decisions that someone made in 1999 in regards to reporting too many statistics, and as employees we were and are still embarrassed. However, it has been corrected for years now. There are still issues with how the player behaves (see the 1st post in the sticky RV9 Info thread), but there is no spyware, and everything can be made to behave nicely with the right options. You can even install an alternative player if you like (MPC), which plays back RV9 wonderfully. This thread starting out about an ATI driver bug, before someone added their less than constructive comment, is long overdue to be closed.

[Sirber]

MPC and RealOne are great players. I prefer MPC because it got pan-scan. Message Center in RealOne is a real pain in the a*s whem you're not registred.

[karl_lillevold]

Yes, message center can be annoying if the messages are of no interest to you, since even though you can prevent it from running in the background, you can not prevent it from popping up while RealOne is running.

So, this may be of help to you then:
Go to c:\program files\common files\real\Update_OB
There should be 3 .exe files there.
First make sure you have turned off auto update features
in the player (instructions in sticky RV9 info thread).
Kill any real...exe processes that might be running.
Then, rename or move away these 3 .exe files (I just added a _ to the filename).

Now, MessageCenter should be gone, at least on my system, it won't even come up if I press the little envelope button, which normally brings it up. Everything else seems to be working normally, but I can not guarantee anything..

[mf]

Originally posted by karl_lillevold
Please, everyone knows about the bad decisions that someone made in 1999 in regards to reporting too many statistics, and as employees we were and are still embarrassed. However, it has been corrected for years now. There are still issues with how the player behaves (see the 1st post in the sticky RV9 Info thread), but there is no spyware, and everything can be made to behave nicely with the right options. You can even install an alternative player if you like (MPC), which plays back RV9 wonderfully. This thread starting out about an ATI driver bug, before someone added their less than constructive comment, is long overdue to be closed.
It's nice to know there's no spyware anymore, but still, is there an RV9 directshow filter ? Can it be made to work with AVI or OGM ? Or any other container (MCF/Matroska?) ? Can I encode RV9 from my favorite VirtualDub ?
My point is, Real likes its own exotic/proprietary interfaces, players and containers. These things make technologies very unattractive to home video guys like me. Even if it beats the shit out of any other video compression, which it doesn't even do. I really don't have the slightest interest in installing Yet Another Proprietary Player, coming with its own Yet Another Proprietary Encoder, all of which most likely will have to be paid for to enable the real "kickass" features. This whole rant goes exactly for Windoze Media as well, with one exception, which is that I can open WMVs in my favorite media player and actually PLAY them, but that is because DirectShow is WMV's native media platform, and because I got the whole decoding stuff free with my OS. Of course it also goes for QuickTime, where I need to install a lame player, which won't even play fullscreen unless I crack it or pay for it. Now QuickTime gets the privilege of having some nice trailers over on apple.com, so I have the damn thing installed on one of the three PCs I have here. I once tried transcoding the trailers to DivX, which worked if I put massive effort in first getting the actual stream to my HD (all the .movs are redirects to redirects), and then transcoding to Indeo at maximum quality (which was almost lossless), after which I could finally load the damn thing into Nandub and get some real encoding done. Needless to say the DivX versions were smaller than the Quicktime versions with minimal quality loss (the only loss there was was from the fact that re-encoding already compressed material always generates loss), while playback looked nicer with Dshow postprocessing, which also worked very nicely on the Sorenson artifacts. Now coupled with this process there were multiple crashes (I still used win98_se in those days), and even once that QuickTime managed to _corrupt_ my fat32 filesystem on a few drives while transcoding to Indeo. Another thing: transcoding FROZE my system for at least half an hour, during which any mouse movement could cause system instability.
Moral of the story: RealMedia, Windows Media and QuickTime are things I want to avoid as much as possible. They suck, no offence karl_lillevold.
And the whole "our compression is better" stuff is crazy too, where Microsoft plain lies, Real achieves "quality" by simply postprocessing everything until no artifacts or detail are left, and Apple (the most honest of them all) doesn't postprocess at all, showing that Sorenson is still no better than other modern MPEG-4 codecs.

I'll stick to my XviD and VDubMod, yesthankyouverymuch.

[Sirber]

I hate Quicktime, and Windows Media, but Real, even if it's a propritary codec, is doing a great job and easy to use. MPC can play RV9 abd also AVI and OGM.

[karl_lillevold]

@mf :Thank you for taking the time to post some well formulated thoughts, albeit mostly about Quicktime. It is much more appreciated than the previous hateful remarks based on Real's past mistakes. (P.S: I, too, have gone through the same steps to transcode QT, but to RV9, again with a much much smaller filesize with almost no loss in quality)

@everyone: I fully understand all your arguments for proprietary vs open. Since I know the the technology behind RV9 and how it compares to MPEG-4, I have no doubt it would compare much better to the best of AVI contained codecs, in particular XviD, if RV9 could be used in DS or AVI, just because of the change of mindset this would lead to. As it is today, a lot of people will not even give it a fair chance and base their opinion on hearsay, since it is proprietary, and also because of the stigma of the past spyware and annoying player habits. There would even be other advantages in that RV9 would gain in quality from this community's and others rate control tuning efforts.

For these reasons, I would personally like to see this happen, but there are business reasons for not doing this. In particular, because RealNetworks would like for people to install and use RealOne. Yes, RealNetworks is trying to make money, which is hard these days, but that's another discussion.

The reason I am hanging out here, is that there is a lot of good advice and feedback to be picked up, along with encoding advice and the development of 3rd party encoding tools. For instance, we added native YV12 support to producer, just because it was requested here. It would not have been added otherwise. Comments on ATI problems, lead to the discovery and sub-sequent fix by ATI of a bug in their drivers. I fixed a problem in the Mode2 plugin for RM. Comments on excessive jitter on certain video cards caused an investigation into this problem (and YES! it has been found and fixed. I have rock steady 30 fps playback of my jitter killer synthetic test clip on my 60 Hz display).

Features useful for a home-theater experience are being added to Producer and RealOne. And the user complaints about RealPlayer and RealOne habits have been heard. The marketing people have backed down, and RealOne V3 will have simple options to disable its annoying habits (instead of having to go through the steps I have explained here). Who knows, maybe even a DS or AVI RV9 codec will result from all of this, but on this topic, I can not make any promises.

[mf]

On2 makes money as well, and they made massive steps towards unproprietarilization(wow now THAT'S what i call an expensive word :p), with VP3 and now Theora. Really, I give them a big thumbs-up and hope they make a lot of money with VP4/5 (even though those codecs aren't that good either, and proprietary). Personally I think throwing outdated codecs into the open is a REALLY good thing, since you never know what open source might be able to do with it. And it vastly improves company image, at least in the eyes of people like me. It's comparable to CrossOver Office and Lindows, where companies invest time in improving something, making money with it, and then giving it back to the OSS community (for people who don't know what I'm talking about: Codeweavers improve on the wine codebase, and after some time they commit their changes back to wine CVS). I really like the sight of that.

[Rash]

Well, my coments to Karl's post.

I'm quite satisfied with the way RV9 is today. I really don't mind using RealOne because I kinda like it. :) But obviously, it has its annoyances sometimes. I wish RealOne was a player that simply played its files (like Winamp3, PowerDVD or MPC).

But, I can't tell how good it would be having RealMedia on AVI container, or even better, on Matroska container. To tell you the truth, Karl, I just wish RealNetworks and Helix became one thing (I mean, no 2 separate names - preferably under Helix name ;)) that would continue developing a really really nice codec (no container or player), just like DivX is today. That would work with other companies and develop RealMedia standalone players, etc. ;)

Maybe this way you could be more popular, and detach that unfortunate image RV made in the past.

But hey! I'm just me! I'm just commenting on Karl's post. ;)

[Kb_cruncher]

After a long wait(building my new Nforce2 system),and installing 3.2 catalyst drivers and dx9 i now have rv9 playback...Yippee.
The results look very nice so far.I'll try encoding goldmember which i know xvid doesn't do well with.