Frozen in AVI land

[magic_dad]

I read alot of posts and didn't see this covered, so I hope it isn't redundant. Whenever I try to re-encode an AVI to MPEG, using NERO or TMPEGC after a random amount of time, my pc freezes. Nothing moves, no mouse, nothing. 19 of 20 times, it does this. I am using win 2k 850 duron, and 512meg pc133 ram. I should have sufficient power to do this. At first, I thought it was background programs running, eating up my resources, so I did a full reload of windows, just updates, vid drivers, and tmpeg, and/or nero 5.5.9.9 and to the same end. This is very frustrating, as you can imagine. Anyone know the fix, or cause of this, or am I the only one to experience it?
The ultimate goal is to burn the AVI to vcd or svcd, but I can't burn them, if they lock up in the encoding process.
Someone help me, PLEASE

[mdm]

What kind of audio do the AVIs have? I've had TMPGenc lock up when the AVI uses a strange audio codec. Saving the audio as a WAV with VirtualDub and then encoding the two files together solved the problem.

[magic_dad]

Unsure of the audio codec, I use the divx 4.12 codec to view and open, seems to be the most reliable and versatile one out there.

where do I get a copy of Virtual dub?

[banjazzer]

Are you sure it's not a heat problem? Durons do run pretty hot, and encoding is pretty CPU intensive.

[magic_dad]

I had actually considered that, but I have tried from a cold start after sitting all night, and it locked up on me in about 3 minutes.....has lasted longer after sitting idle all day, so that to me meant little chance of it being a thermal issue, tho it might still be part of it.......my cpu runs at about 80 degrees under load, so it is on the edge.

[banjazzer]

Do you get the same problem if you save out the audio to uncompressed wav first?

[mdm]

Look at the Tools link on the left to find Virtual Dub.

[onetrueday]

you should try something like prime95 to see if it's hardware related or something related to the movie you're trying to encode.

Also, look up a program called fanspeed. This will give you your current cpu temp without a lot of fuss.