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Gorunova
Joined: 10 Feb 2002 Posts: 318 Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada
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Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2002 3:12 pm Post subject: Performance tweaking |
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A puzzlement to ponder:
I just upgraded from Win95 OSR2 to Win98SE. Overall I'm happy with it, but video playback performance is much lower. I was under the impression that 98 was supposed to be faster than 95.
I'm using the same versions of WMP and Sasami2K that I used on my '95 installation.
I'm not entirely certain I installed the same combination of codecs under 98, but I have installed the latest versions of Xvid, Divx 5.0.2 and OpenDivx, as well as the Total Pack and the Nimo Pack.
Performance is so bad under 98 that when playing divx 4, divx 5 or xvid files the video always lags behind the audio after only a few seconds of play. RealMedia and divx 3 are more or less OK. I had no performance problems with any of these formats under '95.
I can't find any options to skip frames when behind under any of the codecs.
There is a "bicubic resizer" codec that WMP always loads. I can't get rid of it so I assume it's a part of WMP related to window resizing. I never noticed it under '95. Other things that are now loading that didn't before are "Morgan Stream Switcher" and something called G200 (no, not a Matrox product).
I don't know a whole lot about tuning video playback. My biggest success so far is getting rid of audio glitches by turning off hard disk DMA mode.
Any ideas? Anyone with similar experience under '98? |
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Gorunova
Joined: 10 Feb 2002 Posts: 318 Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2002 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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Well, I've made one discovery. That bicubic video resizer I mentioned? If I set it so the output size matches the input size (sadly this is not the default), performance picks up quite a bit since it no longer has to do any work.
This remains true even if I then switch to full-screen mode, which tells me that the bicubic resizer is not the scaling component of WMP but actually a seperate codec-like thing intended to give better quality resizing. Now if I can only figure out how to get rid of it; it doesn't appear under control panel/multimedia. |
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Melchior
Joined: 19 Feb 2002 Posts: 190 Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2002 4:09 pm Post subject: |
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One somewhat similar desyncing problem that I had was due to my video card's drivers. I updated to the newest drivers, and my video-lagginess improved substantially.
...Then my harddrive died and I bought a massive new drive which my motherboard didn't support, so I ended up entirely upgrading my system to a 1.4G machine, which seemed to solve all the lagginess problems. |
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earthdark
Joined: 21 Feb 2002 Posts: 73
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Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2002 5:48 pm Post subject: |
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Cough. This is why I advise people not to install Nimo unless you really go through each and every install option cause it installs way too much...
Bicubic, morgan media switcher and the g200 filter are all directx filters installed by Nimo. VobSub is probably installed too but it never shows itself unless you have a subtitle file with the same name as the video and in the same directory. You should really uninstall the bicubic resizer and the G200 filter. Bicubic resizer makes all your resizes look really smooth cause it does a bicubic resize for every frame.. (think VDub), G200 IIRC is a fix for Matrox G200/400 drivers that mess up when loading videos with a framesize that's not a multiple of four or something. If you do get some weird, random crashes when loading WMP, then you might need to uninstall VobSub too.
Try running the Nimo uninstaller, and then running the installer again and making sure to only select waht you really need. |
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Gorunova
Joined: 10 Feb 2002 Posts: 318 Location: Burnaby, B.C., Canada
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Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2002 1:49 am Post subject: |
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You were right, Earthdark. As an experiment I just tried renaming the bicubic_resizer.ax system file so it wouldn't load. Made all the difference in the world - no more crashes on certain files, and good performance again. I'll take your advice and weed out the rest of the stuff too. Thanks!
I had never heard anything bad about the Nimo pack before. Actually the only codecs I've ever heard badmouthed were the "Angelfish" or whatever divx 3.11 codec and the divx 5 codec that includes adware. |
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