Artifacts when playing Xvid encoded movie

[VirusVDW]

I've encoded a movie using Xvid,
but when I play it I can see red and blue 'pixels' flickering here and there.
I've had this problem before on some movies I encoded, but then I just re-encoded the whole thing (using same settings) and everything
seemed to be alright. (I know, stupid solution :) )
But I don't feel like doing this with this movie, because I used higher quality settings this time, and the encoding took quite a while.

My question is: has anyone else had trouble with red/blue flickering 'pixels' in the image?
What's causing it? Is it the DVD, encoder settings, or am I using a bad decoding coded or something?
How can I solve it?

Tnx!

PS: I'd like to take a screenshot to show the problem, but I don't know how to take one of a movie image. Any suggestions?

[sh0dan]

Use Virtual Dub for screenshots (Ctrl+1 copies the current frame to the clipboard).

You should also give information on:

1) Encoding application.
2) Directshow playback filter (ffdshow/Xvid).
3) Encoding settings (all of them).

[Koepi]

I had such a flickering when I checked some video processing settings in DVD2AVI. leave those untouched.
Also using non-mod16 resolutions can show such a behaviour sometimes.

Regards
Koepi

[VirusVDW]

I didn't touch anything in DVD2AVI and i used resolution 672x256, so that seems to be ok.

I'm using Gordian Knot 0.28.6.2 to encode the movie.
(All codecs used come from the Gordian Knot package)


About the encoding settings:
1st and 2nd pass:
http://users.pandora.be/elfjuli/1stpass.png http://users.pandora.be/elfjuli/2ndpass.png

I didn't change anything on any of the other panes.
(BTW any comments on those settings or how to improve them are welcome!)

Yet I had the problem with my old settings too sometimes, so it shouldn't matter that much.

Windows Media player tells me it's using ffdshow MPEG-4 Video Decoder for video.

I'm not able to show you screenshots, because the effect isn't visible in VirtualDub. The frames shown in VirtualDub also seem to be of a much less quality compared to normal playback, this is probably why those pixels aren't visible.

[VirusVDW]

I have made a small avi file in which the described effect occurs (at least on my computer).

You can download it here (520KB) (http://users.pandora.be/elfjuli/test.avi).
(The effect is especially visible if you view the fragment fullscreen.)

I tried encoding the same fragment with Divx too, and the artifacts are also in the divx encoded fragment, so I guess it has nothing to do with xvid.
I guess this topic isn't really in the right forum subsection anymore then.

[Koepi]

Sorry, but it plays back normal here, no artefacts like you described visible. (No blue or red pixels popping up. Only white pixels from film grain pop up very seldom, but those belong there, i'm confident.)

Try to select another output colour space in the xvid dsf setup and see if the problem is gone for you. You can also try other VGA drivers.

Regards
Koepi