Tired of random video playback, need advice.

[PDubs]

When playing mpegs/wmv/avi files there are random times when the file will just skip ahead for like a second or two, and continue playing normally. There's nothing wrong with the files as they play perfectly on other systems. I'm tired of this happening, so I'm wondering what everyone would suggest for a solution.

Current setup: Asus MB (I think) w/384M SDRAM, 32M TNT2 AGP 2x, dual P3 1GHz (non-overclocked), Win2k Prof. All drivers are up to date, including the DivX playback ones, no Windows updates are necessary, and have the latest DirectX version.

I tried loading XP, but for some reason, XP doesn't like booting up when I installed it. I wonder if it has to do with my chipset (I think it's i815). So short of going to another O/S, is there anything hardware related I could do? I thought about upgrading my video card and getting quality RAM instead of house brands, but I'm unsure if that would solve the problem. Does anyone know of a good video card that is built for dual processors?

Thanks.

 

[Wolfsraider]

things i would check

1.ram usage when its happening
2.memtest to check for errors
3.are you running stuff in the background when it happens
4.temps when it happens
5.psu rail readings
6.driver conflicts

I tried loading XP, but for some reason, XP doesn't like booting up when I installed it.

could be a bad sector on the harddrive as well

are you running intel accelerator and inf and are they updated?

mike

 

[sunase]

I was going to say it's a CPU issue, but my P3 1Ghz laptop can play any MPEG1/2 I've ever seen (while it can barely manage current day MPEG4 even using overlay video and auto or disabled post processing and changing the screen resolution instead of resizing all of which reduce CPU load). MPEG1/2 is generally a lot less CPU intensive than MPEG4.

But anyway, if it really does happen with MPEG2 files then I'd have to vote it's a hard drive problem. Defrag your disks, make your paging file on a seperate hard drive from your system files and/or your playback files. Turn off any applications running in the background, esp. ones involving file accesses like p2p apps and servers. Best upgrade would be more & faster disks and to distribute the load across disks and channels.

Video card upgrade will really have zilch effect on video playback capability. There are hardware cards for decoding mpeg2 (and crappy ones for mpeg4 that don't support all the features/codecs we have for that), but those are seperate cards, not video cards. None of them are really worth it, though, considering how cheap a CPU upgrade is in comparison.