Media Center Mystery #367491: huffyuv avi won't play

[sanlyn]

I'm still using my old Intel-chip PC for almost all of my capture and VirtualDub work. But over the past year I bought two new Media Center machines, a desktop and a laptop, with Athlon processors. The idea was to make captures on the trusty old PC and transfer some of them to the new units and keep two or three sloooowww filtering jobs going at the same time. I get a 250% speed increase from the newer CPU's.

However...For a year now I've had the same problem with all my huffyuv-compressed AVI's. When I load them onto the new machines, this is the kind of playback I get from any media player, including Microsoft, PowerDVD, or any version of VirtualDub, and any other player I try on the new PC's:




At first I thought it might be the Athlon processors. But this same problem occurred with ANY huffyuv avi on EVERY computer I tried it on, whether mine or someone else's. Further complication: If I uncompress the huiffyuv file on my old computer, then play it on another machine, the playback is normal!

Even more complications: A little over a year ago, I captured this same VHS tape on my old machine using VirtualDub/huffyuv. When I play that year-old huffyuv on any other computer, the playback is NORMAL! This capture is from the year-old huffyuv file -- not exactly the same frame, but within a few frames of the one in the "problem" avi, and played on the new Media Center PC on PowerDVD:




Just spent a year looking over every installation of VirtualDub on the old and new machines -- can't see a lick of difference in any of them. Neverthess, the mystery can be summarized this way:

- huffyuv captured videos play OK on the old PC, won't play on any new machine.
- If I uncompress the huffyuv, it will play and process properly on new machines.
- Year-old huffyuv captures I made on the old machines play OK on new and old PC's.
- My 3-year old installs of VirtualDub have never changed, except for update. But I've also used older versions, with the same results as above.

Going to bed now. Been up all night on this -- again!

[sanlyn]

Mystery 367493:

I transferred an uncompressed avi, made in VirtualDub, onto the new Media Center PC. Loaded it into VirtualDub. Uncompressed video plays just fine. Then on the new PC I had VirtualDub make a new huffyuv compressed copy of the avi. New compressed copy works just fine on the new PC.

...But the uncompressed avi that was huffyuv-compressed on the new PC won't play properly on the old PC.

I can't attribute this to the huff dll's. They are exactly the same, huffyuv.dll 2.1.1 CCE patch 2.5. Also used huffyuv 2.1.1 without the patch. Same results all around.

[sanlyn]

(Update 01 June 2007)

I found several posts on the 'Net by others who encountered this or similar problems with compressed AVI's. But no solution was found, oher than one suggestion to replace the original huffyuv DLL v.2.1.1 with the cce patch v.2.1.1_2.2 or the cce patch v.2.5. But this didn't work for any user, and I tried that myself.

The only change on my original PC between a year ago and today is that XP Service Pack 2 was installed. The original AVI's that play OK on all computers were processed when Service Pack 1a was on my original PC. While I needed to have SvcPack 2 installed for various reasons, it did screw up my then-current Ati graphic drivers. To correct, I had to uninstall Ati and re-installed earlier versions.

Anyone who has experienced this problem is invited to discuss. Any geeks in the house?

[jagabo]

Try an older version of huffyuv (some can be found at the "main tool site"). Try setting the "always suggest RGB format for output" option. Also try "enable RGBA".

[sanlyn]

Yep, did all that. Big problem with huffyuv prior to 2.1.1.1 -- avi's made with 2.1.1.1 won't play under older versions of huffyuv, which means NONE of my 2.1.1.1 captures would be playable. That's about 3 years worth of videos. Also, you can't install multiple huffyuv versions on the same machine, though I found that you actually can install 2.1.1.1 and the 2.2 patch at the same time, if you name the two dll's differently and register both in Windows manually with two different names.

"Suggest RGB" has always been turned on, though I tried turning it off as well. No change. RGBA doesn't seem to make any difference, either. Also tried some of the "Advance" options in Media Player; no dice (made it worse, in fact).

Thanks for the suggestions, I shoulda mentioned that I tried all those options.

I still say it's SvcPak 1a/2 vs MediaCenter glich somewhere. Others have had similar problems.

Meanwhile I'm transferring uncompressed former "huff's" back and forth, then recompress when I'm finished so I can archive the AVI segments on DVD (don't even suggest archiver/compressors, they take hours and there's too much compressor damage). Pain in the neck (and elsewhere), even if does take only 5-min to copy a 10-GB segment on my WD external drive.

I might mention: some of my old DivX avi's play OK, but newer ones have problems on new PC's. Alas, could it be that my old PC is the culprit? I checked that, too. All old and new huffyuv's will play on an ancient Dell (1999) Pentium-III with Win2000, and another old Gateway PC with XP-home SvcPak1a -- but not on new PC's. So I'm suspecting XP SvcPaks and Media Center, and the way they handle certain compressed AVI's.

Someone has also suggested uninstalling Windows WDM's from the new Media Center PC's, and installing older ones. Only problem with that: none of these PC's have WDM or capture cards installed right now, and newer PCI cards won't work in MediaCenter with VirtualDub. In fact, MediaCenter and Vista are out of the question, period, for new captures; Gates and his SS programmers made certain you'd have to buy all-new gear/software and use their 3rd-rate media stuff, or just stay 5 years behind. I tried installing my old trial version of TMPGenc-Plus MPEG encoder on a MediaCenter machine, and it simply froze up and died.

Am now considering backing-up one MediaCenter machine with DriveImage, and installing WinXP Pro. Two problems with that: (a) Time, about 3 days, and (b) if it works, I'm stuck with going to eBay and buying two more valid copies of XP-Pro. Think I'll wait a bit on that brilliant scheme.

One thing: I could take the old PC, uninstall huffyuv, and reinstall it. But I'm scared to death that my new captures might have the same problems!

[Krispy Kritter]

Maybe you've tried this already in your troubleshooting, but have you uninstalled/reinstalled your video drivers and codecs after the SP2 update. Although SP2 is safe and recommended, you sometimes have to do a little housekeeping afterwards, especially with drivers.

[jagabo]

Try using ffdshow's HuffYUV encoder/decoder. You could use the version of HuffYUV that can decode your files properly, then use ffdshow's HuffYUV to recompress. Or vice-versa.

[sanlyn]

Maybe you've tried this already in your troubleshooting, but have you uninstalled/reinstalled your video drivers and codecs after the SP2 update.

KK, you could be onto something there, but Ati's drivers were reinstalled after SP2. In fact, SP2 found older sp1a WDM's from Ati and replaced them with new WDM capture support files. These rendered VirtualDub worthless for capturing, and gave my Ati card all kinds of problems (for instance, my Personal Recorder setups disappeared and MMC refused to find my tv tuner). So I reinstalled WDM, Ati, etc., and reinstalled all of Ati for Cat4.5. Everything returned to normal. This was discussed earlier by people with similar WDM problems:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic308409.html

But, uh, yep...the problem could be not in huffyuv somehow, but in the captures themselves and the WDM issue. Be damned if I know how to solve that one, though, because there's no way new WDM's would allow capture with VDub and the 9600XT. In any case, if I convert to uncompressed AVI, all goes well on any PC I try.

jagabo: Think I'll download ffdshow and see what happens. Ought to be a great way to burn up the whole weekend (I have a summer cold anyway and it's raining here, so the beach is out).

The problem seems to be not -older- pc's, but all new ones whether they're MediaCenter or just new XP's from about 2004 on. I'm also taking a look around old and new to see what's different about their video processing setup.

[sanlyn]

Tried ffdshow in vDub and AviSynth. No improvement. Time to start comparing video support areas between the old PC and the new.

[sanlyn]

Examining old and new PC's, I find many similarities...and some differences. A little of research (3 weeks!) on the 'Net is beginning to point to a colorspace/decoder problem.

According to many sites with DivX and AVI playback glitches, the Windows registry holds the key to DLL's used for encoding/decoding. The most common problems involve keys in this area of the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32

Among HKLM driver entries commonly found on PC's worlwide, these are the "usual suspects":

Old PC's
-----------
VIDC.UYVY = msyuv.dll . . . .Entry on new PC = same
VIDC.YVYU = msyuv.dll. . . ..Entry on new PC = same
VIDC.YUY2 = ATIVYUY.DLL....Entry = msyuv.dll on new PC's (correct)

NOTE: msyuv is the defauit for most PC's. Not only is
"ATIVYUY" not a standard encoder/decoder (it is an Ati driver),
it no longer existed on my old PC!! I changed it to msyuv.dll.

VIDC.HFYU = huffyuv.dll..........same on new PC's
VIDC.YV12 = ATIYUV12.DLL.....Not on new PC's
VIDC.YU12 = ATIYUV12.DLL.....Not on new PC's

The last two "VIDC" entries are YV12/YU12 "handlers". If these last 2 entries don't exist in the registry, Windows somehow finds a YV12 or YU12 decoder DLL to translate YV12/YU12 for RGB playback. I've seen many posts where infamous Ati DLL's replaced YV12 handlers for DivX. The cure for that is to replace the Ati filename with the usual DivX or Xvid decoder name (xvidvfw.dll). But my huff AVI's are all RGB.

I think the ATi drivers appear on my old PC because I once had Ati's DVD Player installed. Apparently, removing the player didn't change these YV12/YU12 registry values. Removing my old Ati Catalyst 5.5 didn't remove the orphan entry for Ati's ATIVYUY.DLL -- which hasn't existed on my system since I removed Cat 5.5 in Oct 2005.

I suspect encoders: on my new PC's, I ran the huffyuv uninstaller. Huffyuv disappeared, of course, from my VirtualDub encoder list. I also deleted huffyuv.dll from both PC's. Then I ran some huffyuv avi's -- instead of an error message, I just get the same distorted playback as before!!

I found a trick on the 'Net, supposed to cure huffyuv or other avi problems. Huffyuv users go to the registry and change all "msyuv.dll" entries to "huffyuv.dll". Said to work because huffyuv is really based on msyuv. So I gave it a try. Didn't work.

[jagabo]

Try GraphEdit. It will show you all the filter used to render the video.



You can right click on the filters and their input/output pins to see details about them.

[sanlyn]

Thanks, jagabo, but it looks like GraphEdit is telling me that none of my new computers has any of the filters or services needed to play a huffyuv avi, whether old or new. Also told me neither of my two PC's can play DivX.

I don't think GraphEdit is supposed to tell you what's going to be used to play videos. I think you have to tell the program what you plan to use, and the program plays the file and shows you whether it works or not, and what made it crash. GraphEdit played my huffyuv for several minutes until I stopped it, and it played exactly like the first capture I posted in this thread.

I'm certain at this point that something went on in Oct 2006 when I installed ServicePack 2 and had to fall back to earlier versions of lots of software, because SvcPak2 was such a disaster (and still is). No AVI I've made since then on that PC has been able to play on new machines. Looks like I'm just stuck with moving uncompressed AVI's around, there's no way I'm wasting another month to re-install my old PC and buy half my registered software licenses again, or negotiate for weeks for license keys to reinstall registered software.

Shucks. And I only have about 250 more hours of VHS to transfer to DVD. Guess I might as well stop worrying and get on with it.

[jagabo]

GraphEdit usually works both ways for me. It can automatically build a graph (via File -> Render Media File, or drag-and-drop) or you can build one yourself.

Another tool that will show you the filters used in playing a video is Media Player Classic. While the video is playing you can right click on the window and go to Filters. You can then select a filter and see information about its input and output pins, etc.

I have several computers runnins XP SP2 and have no problems with HuffYUV. I do remember having a problem in the past but I don't remember exactly what it was or how I fixed it. But I think it was related to using different versions of HuffYUV.

Another thing to note is that HuffYUV (the installed codec) is a VFW filter, not a Directshow filter. I believe AVI Decompressor (Microsoft's quartz.dll) will fall back on a VFW filter if no DirectShow filter is found but this will be invisible to the player. AVI Decompressor seems to decode HuffYUV to RGB all the time. On my computer it then goes through a colorspace converter before going to the video renderer (display driver).

You can change ffdshow's output colorspace to force YV12, YUY2, RGB32, etc. Build a filter graph with ffdshow as the HuffYUV decompressor, disable all but one colorspace, then render ffdshow's output pin (right click on the output pin and select render). Then see what colorspaces is causing problems. I suspect you do have a colorspace converter or video renderer (video driver) problem.

If you can get VirtualDub to read your files properly on one computer, you could try converting them to Lagarith. That's another lossless YUY2 compression codec. It's slower than HuffYUV but also compresses better.

[sanlyn]

jagabo, I believe we're both going down the same path: via vfw, encoders, etc. The unexplained part here is why AVI's made before a certain time (using the same software and OS) will play OK on other machines, but AVIs made after that time have to be decompressed to work on the other PC's; or why an uncompressed AVI that is compressed on the new PC's won't play on the old PC.

As for YU12, etc...all these AVIs are captured into RGB24, worked with VirtualDub and AviSynth in RGB24, and ultimately get into TMPGenc or CCE Basic encoders as RGB24. So, at some point something has happened on the old PC that changed the way colorspaces are being handled.

I have on hand all the tools you mentioned, and will spend more time working up your suggestions (for which I say thank you). Meanwhile I'm backing-up the c-partition on my older PC with DriveImage onto a spare hard drive. Fortunately, I keep all programs and the OS on "C", but all data, docs, videos, downloads, etc., on separate partitions. The clues you furnished, however, convince me that the problem is on the old PC, not on all of the new ones in the whole world.

[sanlyn]

jagabo: As for different versions of Huffyuv, I've always used only one version, downloaded from Digitalfaq.com (v.2.1.1 - ceesp patch v.0.2.2, Dec 2001). All versions 2.x.x., whether the "patch" or not, are compatible. Versions 1.x.x. and 2.x.x. are not.

It does appear that something is amiss with either my VFW or my AVI rendering setup, though. I might fix that by re-installing my Ati drivers. But I'd have to finish this current VHS project first and then do a system backup (just in case my "fix" makes all my current captures unplayable). But I thought newer versions of Windows, even tho they don't use VFW, had VFW wrappers around their newer DirectShow stuff.

In any case, I capture, process and encode in RGB24. I've sometimes used AviSynth for work that required YV12, etc., but otherwise I saw no advantage using anything but RGB24, since VDub, NeatVideo, and all of TMPGenc use RGB. Also, gSpot and other AVI analyzers tell me these files are all RGB.

Regardless, I think a reinstall effort is in order. Will be a while before I can do that. Thanks, folks, for all the ideas presented here. Stay tuned . . .