Problem with Viewing Clips

[bandt001]

Can anyone help a brother out??

Whether it's WinAmp or RealPlayer, when I download high quality clips I get motion and sound for the first few seconds...then the picture freezes. Sometimes the sound continues, sometimes not.

Am I just out of memory? I should have 32 megs of video memory and 128 megs of SDRAM (whatever that is). Is there some update I'm missing?

Any help appreciated!

Bandit

 

[cosquillero1]

Can anyone help a brother out??

Whether it's WinAmp or RealPlayer, when I download high quality clips I get motion and sound for the first few seconds...then the picture freezes. Sometimes the sound continues, sometimes not.

Am I just out of memory? I should have 32 megs of video memory and 128 megs of SDRAM (whatever that is). Is there some update I'm missing?

Any help appreciated!

Bandit

What OS have you (Windows, Mac or Linux) ?. If you have Windows, what version (95, 98, 98 SE, XP, Me, 2000 and so) ?. What player you have ?, that happens ever with any clip, or only with some clips ?.

 

[bandt001]

Thanks Cos!

I am running Windows XP and using RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and now WinAmp. These seem to be the clips I download from the Mousepad....good, high quality, and completley unviewable!

Even with different players (RP vs WMP) the problem seems to be the same.

Bandit

 

[MistressValerie1]

First of all, 128 MB of SDRAM is not really enough for Windows XP. I strongly recommend that you get at least 256 MB, more if possible.

However, the symptoms you are describing sound like incomplete downloads or corrupted files. This is notorious with Real Media in particular.

Is this happening only with videos you download from that one site? If so, it may be a problem with their server, or even perhaps uploads that broke.

I suggest that you try downloading Real files from other sites and seeing if they play normally. If so, the problem is at the 'Pad.

Good luck,

 

[cosquillero1]

Well in my case, i have 128 MB of ram, 3 GB of hard disk, 4 MB of video and never have had troubles playing clips, except when i hadn't downloaded all codecs (divx, xdiv and anothers). Maybe your trouble is like said MistressValerie, or maybe your pc got a viruses. Do you have a good antiviruses program ?.

 

[bandt001]

Thanks to both of you! I have Semantic antivirus so I'm going to assume it's a SDRAM issue and try getting more. Or transferring the clips to a newer machine to see if that works better. Really appreciate the replies.

Bandit

 

[cosquillero1]

Thanks to both of you! I have Semantic antivirus so I'm going to assume it's a SDRAM issue and try getting more. Or transferring the clips to a newer machine to see if that works better. Really appreciate the replies.

Bandit

You're welcome . I don't know that antivirus program, i have Norton Antivirus, this softaware is updating each 15 days aprox. ,Does that antivirus (Semantic) update same periods ?.

 

[Smade1]

We can rule out the codecs issue immediately as if that's the problem the clip will load with a diagonal white black pattern and play audio only.

128Mb is really a basic requirement for XP or 2000 (by the way anyone else notice that W2k is windows 5 and XP is windows 5.1 or something?) and this gives you the windows environment running but little room for applications. The available memory will be split between whatever applications are running so if you only run whichever media player the application is set up for it might work.

To me it sounds like a classic "virtual memory" bottleneck caused by the difference in speeds between video memory, RAM and hard disk space.

Since Windows 95 a portion of your hard disk is used as "swap space" between the disk and RAM to enable the system to multi-task or work with large files. In other words part of your hard disk is "virtual memory" - you didn't pay for it but you've got it. Did you ever see how upset your system gets if you switch it off without using the shut-down feature? The penalty of this is that the transfer rate is about 100:1 - i.e. the hard disk is about 100 times too slow.

In viewing large format hi-res video the system has to transfer from the image file to the graphics processor and this works initially but a couple of seconds saturates the memory and it all falls apart.

What will fix it?
Cheapest - increase swap space - PM me if you need to know how - may work but if you have an older disk drive (say less than 30Gb) it probably won't work as it can't supply the data fast enough.

Medium - more RAM - I've got 400Mb here but would rather be running 750 or 1GB as I like to run lots of things and there all hungry. Note - RAM needs to be matched to type and processor - I have SDRAM at 133Mhz which means I can't use ESDI RAM (the new super bollocks) at 200Mhz. If you mix speeds and types at worst it won't work and at best it will run slow. All your RAM needs to be the same type and also run at a speed that suits your processor.

Expensive - a new video card - but will also have to match rest of system or you won't get the benefit.

"On Tuesday crossed the English Channel which appeared to be flooded" Spike Milligan

 

[Snowbank1]

Make sure you take as much out of your memory as possible. You don't need it clogged with all the useless programs windows trys to run. Having icons load onto your taskbar takes up a lot of unnecessary memory. Get rid of them. Make sure you have some free space in your hard drive for windows to use.

Then try the VLC player http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html You should be scanning your computer for any malicious programs that might running and stealing your precious memory. Try Ad-aware. http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10045910.html