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Digital Video Issues


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#1
tatercat

tatercat

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Hello and Happy Thanksgiving!

For the last three weeks to a month, whenever I play a video file, the video may play fine for anywhere between 1 and 10 minutes, then it slows down to playing a few frames, freeze a second or two, play a few more frames, freeze a second or two. This problem occurs no matter what media player I use (Media Player Classic, AlShow, Divx, Quicktime, etc). It seems to happen no matter what file I try to play. I have had various computer issues over the past year or so that will seem to somewhat resolve themselves after some tinkering (such as reinstalling programs like Firefox and Photoshop, removing Norton when it seemed to be corrupted, stopping programs running in the background, and trying to clean up junk on my machine). There always seems to be a new problem, though, and I've probably caused more problems than I've solved. My system is not the most up-to-date system, having a 350 Watt Power Supply on a socket 775 Motherboard and Celeron 2.4 GHz with 1GB Ram. I have tried playing the files from the USB drives as well as the internal PATA drives. It all plays the same.

I have tried various malware and spyware removal programs, replacing my codecs completely, shutting down services I do not need, cleaning my TSR programs that begin on start up, and doing multiple virii scans.

Any help the community can provide would be appreciated. I'm not adverse to reformatting and reinstalling Windows if necessary, but I know that can be a big deal and I'm not 100% sure where the problem is at this point (I guess I don't even know if it is a hardware or system problem or possibly both). Thank you so much for whatever help you can offer.

Thanks,
TC
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#2
makai

makai

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Well, according to what you wrote, it seems you know your way around doing the obvious stuff.

You mentioned you killed a lot of background processes, but out of curiosity, how many processes are running in Task manager. My desktop runs 21 processes, and thats even with Firefox running as I'm typing this. You might try bringing up the task manager to see what's eating up processing cycles as you play your videos and monitor to see if anything is going on when your problem shows it's face.

The other possibility is that its hardware. Perhaps something is warming up as you're playing vids. Video will tend to heat up your vid card (and ram) due to the amount of information that's constantly being displayed. Have you cleaned your computer recently? Blown out the dust inside the case, fans, video card fans?
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#3
tatercat

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A belated thanks to Makai for responding. I'd kind of reached the point that I thought it was hardware-related, and I was encouraged to see that was the direction you seemed to think I should go in. I still have a nagging feeling that there might be too much running or something out there that I'm not catching on the computer, but I haven't been able to find anything that I know to be out of the ordinary (FYI, I'm running approximately 35 processes currently without a noticeable increase in processes when playing videos). I checked inside the case for dust, and it was pretty clean. I dusted away the little that was there, though. Since writing the first time, I have replaced my power supply with a more powerful one (300 W to 500 W). That has made a significant difference. I still get a little video lag, but it is brief and the video is able to recover well enough to make it watchable. On the plus side, the audio keeps going and the lag is minor. On the down side, this lag is now visible on both videos stored on my hard drive and when I play DVDs. I'm considering upgrading my processor at this point, which I need to do anyway. If you or anybody else has any other suggestions for where to go from here, I'd be very happy to hear them. Thanks again.

TC
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