WMP seek bar doesn't work on paused XviD video

[PBear]

Started using XviD for the first time recently on some short vidclips captured from old VHS tapes and am really impressed by how much it improves quality compared to other encoders (the AVIs I'm getting look much nicer than the original DVD-quality MPEG captures I did), but just noticed this small glitch when playing them back in Windows Media Player.

This is a small issue, that seems to affect the decoder only, not the encoder, but thought the dvlprs might be interested to know about it (checked the FAQs and did a search on a couple of key words, but didn't see any prior mention of it here).

Specifics: Using XviD-Nic ver 5.1.0.959 and, I have to assume, the decoder that came with it (xvid.ax) to view my resultant XviD-encoded .AVI videos in WMP (XP ver). When viewing the files, the seek bar in WMP will only work while the video is playing. When the video is paused or stopped, sliding or clicking on the seek bar will only move the video forward or back to two or three specific frames near the beginning of the file (always the same ones). There's no way to scan through and see single frames of the entire video file while the player is stopped. This is not true of any other video decoders I've used in WMP (except the one for Windows Media format, which seems to be "by design" <groan>).

Have tried out more than a half dozen AVI files created with XviD, with the same result. Can seek still frames throughout paused AVI's encoded with DivX (5.1) or Microsoft MPEG-4 (v1 or v2) [as well as regular MPEG 1 or 2 videos made with TMPGEnc] with no problem.

As said, this does not seem to be a problem with XviD encoding; the key frames all seem to be there and properly indexed because (ta-da), if I change the FOURCC code on one of these XviD-encoded AVI's to "DX50" and play it back in Windows Media Player (which will then use the DivX decoder), I can seek forward or backward to any point in the movie using the seek bar whether the movie is playing or stopped - as desired.

Since this doesn't seem to be an encoding problem, I'll assume no one wants to know what XviD encoding settings I'm using (but can certainly supply them on request).

Anyone have any comments or thoughts for a fix?

Cheers.

[Nic]

Thanks for the detailed report, it's probably a problem with my Decoder Filter...Ill try and look into it when time permits.

Have you tried using ffdshow as an alternative decoder for XviD...It can use XviD.dll to do its decoding and may not have this problem.

-Nic

[PBear]

Originally posted by Nic

Have you tried using ffdshow as an alternative decoder for XviD...It can use XviD.dll to do its decoding and may not have this problem.

-Nic
Thanks for the reply, Nic.

I found I had a version of ffdshow (20030523) that I'd installed (then uninstalled) about a month ago - all those settings scared me off, besides I'm personally not too keen on the whole idea of post-processing, preferring instead to try to tweak my files to the best quality possible during the encoding stage in the interest of portability (most of my friends are so non-tech that they can barely learn how to open a media file on their computers, let alone figure out how to change decoders or optimize quality settings!).

Anyway, I reinstalled ffdshow (for XviD only) and it does fix the seek problems during paused playback. I find that my files lose quality, though, if ffdshow uses libavcodec (I'm probably using encoding settings in XviD that libav doesn't handle yet - I'll have to go over the newbie notes and FAQ several more times before I get all that straight). But, when I set ffdshow to use xvid.dll, the quality seems to be restored to the same level as when using xvid.ax.

So, apparently, the problem lies with xvid.ax. If and when you get some time, adding those seek capabilities to the decoder would be helpful - after which I would probably opt to uninstall ffdshow again, to save overhead, as I'm not really having any other problems with playback quality.

BTW: I notice the version of ffdshow I'm using is about a year newer than the one available for download here. I can't remember where I got it, but I have to guess I went to the official site. Maybe I grabbed the latest (unstable?) development version there. Either that, or the one here on Doom9's link is outdated.

Again, thanks for your time.