Divx Player hangs for 2 minutes while playing video

[billqs]

I just recently did a fresh reinstall of XP on a new harddrive and downloaded the Divx 6.5 player. I was watching some old episodes of Dr. Who (I think they may have been encoded in Divx 3) and about 15 minutes in each episode the video would disappear, the desktop would pop back up and the sound would continuously loop the last 2 seconds. Trying Control Alt Delete would bring up the task bar only after about 2 minutes, upon which the video would start to play again as if nothing had happened.

I went back over the area and it played fine. This happened one to two times each video.

When the task manager would come up, it would show 95-100% CPU usage apparently at the time of the hang up. I noticed the hold one frame for computer spikes was not checked in the Divx Codec configuration and I checked that. I have been unable to play anything else to see if that would work.

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2, Celeron D 3.2 G, 1Gig DDR2533 Memory, PCChips P23 motherboard, ATI 9600 SE Video Card. Board also contains a Sound Blaster Live card and a Hauppauge Roslyn Hardware MPEG2 Decoder.

Any suggestions?

[Ai Haibara]

You should probably run the videos you're having a problem with through a utility like GSpot and see what it says about them (for example, if they are indeed encoded using DivX 3).

That said, DivX 3 support in the current versions of DivX and Xvid doesn't seem to work well all the time, as far as I've seen. I think some choose to actually install the old DivX 3.11 codec as well, or might use ffdshow. I'm not sure about any other alternatives (or whether or not Xvid might support DivX 3 better than DivX 6 )

Do the symptoms persist if you use a player that uses its own (internal) codecs, such as VLC or mplayer?

[billqs]

I'll run them through GSpot to see exactly which version of Divx caused them. I'll look into the other players as well.

Thanks!

[billqs]

I ran GSpot and these are Divx 3 files. I'll look into adding the Divx 3.11 codec.

[billqs]

Actually, I had GSpotted the wrong files. The ones that are hanging up the system are Divx 4.

I ran the videos with the Task Manager up and also SpeedFan to measure temperature. There were no temp issues, but the 2 minute hang was definitely accompanied by a sudden and prolonged 100% CPU event.

This is standard def video and I'm surprised I am getting this. My ATI 9600 is supposed to have hardware divx acceleration. I'm not sure what is causing this. I never noticed this problem on the previous install...

[Krispy Kritter]

Instead of watching the cpu, have you tried watching the process tab to see which process is using the cpu during the hang?

[billqs]

Thanks!

I'll try that next. I may also try to go back one release of Divx to 6.4. I wasn't having these problems until after I installed 6.5.1.

[billqs]

I was taking Krispy Kritter's suggestion and viewing the processing and not noticing anything very out of the ordinary till the inevitable hang up occurred. When it came back it defaulted to the windows sign in screen. This caused the refrigerator light bulb to go on in my brain and I disabled the screen saver and have not had the problem recur since. Perhaps this will help others with similar issues.