Video crash Where to start troubleshooting

[zaphod7501]

Normally I like to lurk and search archives before asking questions but it's a little too early in the life of the product to do that yet so here goes.
My initial installation of the trial version worked fine in the morning after a reboot but would crash the PC hard (when I restarted in the evening) every time I opened a file (a blank gray box inside a blank white box). Ctl-alt-del or the reset button was the only recovery. After various reinstallations of various things giving no help , I found that turning down hardware acceleration in the performance box of video settings and not starting playback of a file when opened lets everything work ; and work great it does.

I can live with this annoyance (by resetting preferences when I start an editing session) but I'd rather not. There are so many possible conflicts that I could use some guidance on where to start. The only crashes on the PC since I built it have been Mozilla and my KVM switch messing up screen resolutions at bootup (a couple of times) . My system is running the following things that could need tweaking.
Win98se
DirectX8.1
AthlonXP2000+ (VIA KT333 chipset)
512 ram
MSI GF3 Ti200 128mb
Hollywood Plus hardware decoder card
Hauppauge PVR250
Soundblaster PCI 128
Linksys 10/100 NIC
Goldstar 16x DVDRom
Sony 52-24-52 CD-RW
Logitech Trackman marble+ (trackball)
WD 80Gb HDD (partitions 8 and 72 )
Most drivers were current as of a few months ago.
Files are located on the D: drive and accross the LAN and were created with a Hauppauge PVR250 on two different PCs. Any good starting points would be appreciated rather than shooting wildly at moving targets.

[DanR]

Wow, this is the first time in a very long time that I've heard of VideoReDo crashing a system. A couple of our beta users are Win98 folks so we have done some testing on that platform. Most however are Win2K or XP as you might imagine.

First off, if the YUV acceleration causes a crash, then lets leave it off. With the speed of your system YUV acceleration shouldn't be an issue, it was initially added so that VideoReDo could handle much slower systems (<1GHz).

Lets first look at your video configuration. On our FTP site: ftp://videoredo:videoredo@ftp.drdsystems.com/ download and run the program in DXCapsViewer.zip. There's an option to save the whole tree to a file, do so and email it me (support@videoredo.com). That should give us some indication if there are any video support issues.

What preferences are you changing after the session start? Knowning that would be helpful.

Try dragging and dropping an MPEG file onto the VideoReDo desktop icon. Are there any problems opening this way?

What software do you use for media playback? Were any running at the time VideoReDo starts up? Perhaps a task manager (did they call it that on Win98) might help.

One last thing. When the trial version ran well in the morning was it before or after you installed your trial key. Without the trial key you don't get a "Nag" screen. The Nag screen slows the startup down which appears to be at the heart of the problem. If necessary, I'll setup a Win98SE system here and test things out.

[phd]

I remember on systems with AMD and the Via KT??? there was a PCI latency problem that caused tons of problems with video. There is the 4in1 patch that helped address it. Also there was something about going into the BIOS and changing the latency setting. I don't know if this would help address the issue. I don't remember all the specifics, sorry.

Here is a web site that talks about it a little.
http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/7.html

Also you might want to try a Google search for additional info

I was a Beta tester and am running VideoReDo on a 98SE system so I've been using it for a while. The AMD chip and motherboard were changed out a long time ago. Its got a Celeron chip and MOBO but I don't get any hard crashes using VRD.

[zaphod7501]

Well , I think I've crashed enough for the night but here's what I've found so far . It's a black box inside a gray box when it crashes. When it seemed to work OK at first , I had already entered the key , so no nag . 98se doesn't have a nice task manager with recorded errors like 2000 and since these files are shared all over the house I prefered 98 and it's lenient permissions for this box.
I can use Powerstrip to control all my latencies but no help that I can see yet (fairly recent 4in1 drivers also)
YUV was off , didn't think I needed it . Most of the settings in VRD I changed were while acceleration was turned down so I don't think that's much help. The one that did help somewhat was disabling the play video when opened option.
Drag and drop works most of the time right now , depending on file size. The bigger the file the more likely to crash - 1Gb seems to be the transition point.
Now here's a good one for you ; I have a 920Mb file (recorded at 3Mb/s avg bitrate) If I open VRD and open the file it will crash. If I drag and drop it onto the desktop icon it will open OK. After it opens OK , if I close VRD , then open VRD and then open the same file with the dialog boxes it will then open OK. If I select a different file however it will crash.
A 2GB file will almost never open , even with drag and drop.

I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it , turning down hardware acceleration (in desktop properties - settings - advanced - performance , in case I wasn't clear as to how I got it working reliably) during an editing session is a small price to pay for an editor that works this well. My basic system is powerfull enough to make up for any loss in performance. I've worked with obstinate hardware and software for quite a while and I'll keep trying things and am open to suggestions. I'll email that diagnostic file to you Dan . BTW Dxdiag.exe seems to check everything out OK on the directdraw and direct3d tests.

edit: forgot , no media players running at the time , I normally use my Hollywood Plus hardware decoder for playback locally (great TV output) or a Hauppauge MediaMVP for network play - its running on a different PC since it needs Windows 2000 and an Athlon600 with a 4Mb Trident video card works great as a recorder with a PVR250 and WinTvCap running in task scheduler but it lacks the horsepower to be an editing machine. Now ' I'm going to grab a glass of Brandy and sit and watch a couple of shows I edited with your nice software earlier

[DanR]

This sounds like some kind of strange timing issue with Win98. There are a whole bunch of threads going at the same inside VideoReDo, so maybe something is starting out of order. VideoReDo is insensitive to file size, especially on FAT32 systems with their 2GB limit.

I'm going to convert one my XP boes to Win98 tommorow and see if I can duplicate your problem. Not much more for you to do right now.

I did get your email, but it didn't have the entire device tree. Looks like you only sent me a sub-tree. I'm looking for information on the FourCC codes and Overlay capabilities. You'll want to make sure you "Print Whole Tree to File." This only has to do with the YUV acceleration, not the startup issue.

[DanR]

OK, I've loaded Win98SE onto an Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB, 100Mbit ethernet, 8MB PCI ATI video card with default windows drivers, DirectX 8.1.

Hate to say it, but it runs like a top, very responsive, even better than Windows XP on a P4 at 2.8 GHz. Tried auto play on files of all sizes, small local files, and large > 3GB files over from my server box. Nothing fails. Even the YUV acceleration works.

Since the major differences between our systems are the video cards, do you have another video card to try in that system? Another thing is to try and change the resolution. Maybe that has some effect. At this stage I just want to isolate the problem.

[phd]

Dan,

Any chance the Hollywood MPEG decoder card might be interfering?

Also FWIW I've only got a small SiS 8MB video card in my machine. Don't have access to the NTFS partitions of the other machine but have been loading and editing 800-900MB files no problem.

Only 128MB RAM.

[DanR]

Pat, I think its the NVidia card. Remember Tom has some issues with his that took a while to correct. If Tom's monitoring this forum, and has a Win98 box hanging around maybe he can see if this can be duplicated.

I'm pretty sure its a timing issue with the auto start, but since I can't duplicate the problem I'll have to do it by deskchecking.

[phd]

What screen resolution and color depth are you running?

Could you try lowering each one independently and see if it makes a difference?

(I ran across this troubleshooting tip for a similar issue, give it a try.)

[zaphod7501]

Thanks for all the help . I'm assuming at this time that I have a driver/hardware conflict that is pretty specific to my system. I can make things worse but not better so I'm going to stop fiddling until I have time to do major re-installs or upgrades. Since reducing hardware acceleration in display properties works (I loose the TV out feature of the video card which I don't use since I have the Hollywood card) I'm going to leave well enough alone for now. If I stumble on a solution I'll be sure to post the results for others to see.

[zaphod7501]

Just a quick follow up here. After adding another hard drive with Win2000 and all the latest drivers (very clean install) the problem persisted (sort of). The symptoms were a little different under Win2000 -- no complete lockup but the preview image was out of horizontal sync. After noticing some current posts , I turned video card YUV acceleration 'on' and the image stabilized. (If I turn off DirectDraw hardware acceleration it also works).