Crunchie's XVID's 'hang' MCE

ceesvant · **25th March 2006, 02:16 AM**

Hello Arkay,

I am using Crunchie to reduce recorded TV programs to handy size, but experience
some strange phenomena when playing them.

I run Crunchie on a remote machine (P4), whereby it obtains the input data from the
HTPC (directory is made public) and places the converted file back on the HTPC.
I installed ffdshow both on my HTPC and on the remote machine, although this
does not use this for conversion.

Now when I play the converted file, the GUI of MCE becomes terribly slow. It queues
the received commands from the IR remote, but handles them way later in time (tens
of seconds later). The strange thing is that this only occurs with files converted by
Crunchie, playing other XVID files from the Internet reacts fine. I tried different bitrates,
but to no avail. When I run MCE in a reduced window and monitor the CPU load, I
see it dramatically increase (range 70-90%) when playing the XVID file. Normal
TV viewing leaves this around 40%. My perception is that when I run the video in
full screen mode, the codec CPU performance runs near to 100%, leaving no
performance for the GUI. Running the codec at a lower level than the GUI should solve
this, but I am not aware of means to achive this.

My brothers HTPC (using identical hardware) reacts likewise.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Ceesvant

pepeto2001 · **25th March 2006, 04:52 AM**

try setting priority to a lower value in dvrmstoolbox settings...

arkay · **25th March 2006, 08:37 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by ceesvant

Hello Arkay,

I am using Crunchie to reduce recorded TV programs to handy size, but experience
some strange phenomena when playing them.

I run Crunchie on a remote machine (P4), whereby it obtains the input data from the
HTPC (directory is made public) and places the converted file back on the HTPC.
I installed ffdshow both on my HTPC and on the remote machine, although this
does not use this for conversion.

Now when I play the converted file, the GUI of MCE becomes terribly slow. It queues
the received commands from the IR remote, but handles them way later in time (tens
of seconds later). The strange thing is that this only occurs with files converted by
Crunchie, playing other XVID files from the Internet reacts fine. I tried different bitrates,
but to no avail. When I run MCE in a reduced window and monitor the CPU load, I
see it dramatically increase (range 70-90%) when playing the XVID file. Normal
TV viewing leaves this around 40%. My perception is that when I run the video in
full screen mode, the codec CPU performance runs near to 100%, leaving no
performance for the GUI. Running the codec at a lower level than the GUI should solve
this, but I am not aware of means to achive this.

My brothers HTPC (using identical hardware) reacts likewise.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Ceesvant

It could be your version of ffdshow. Also, have you got any optimisations turned on in ffdshow? Any postprocessing you do will eat CPU.

Using double rate deinterlacing can cause slow playback on slower machines. They require a lot of CPU for decoding. Other than that I don't think it's anything specific to mencoder or Crunchie given thousands of other people use it every day without issues

Cheers,

Arkay.

ceesvant · **28th March 2006, 05:44 AM**

Hello Arkay

switching off postprocessing in ffdshow seems to do the trick, thanks! WAF has
dramatically increased!

What I noticed is that the translated XVIDs have a resolution of 640 x 346. Isnt there
a way to increase that to e.g. standard PAL (720/702 x 576)? Or any other resolution?

Thanks again in advance......

Regards, Ceesvant

arkay · **28th March 2006, 08:59 AM**

In the program install directory is a .ini file that has two values in it that you can change.

AR69 and AR43. These are the resolutions used for widescreen and fullscreen content.

Be wary that they MUST be divisible by 16 for xvid.

Cheers,

Arkay.

ceesvant · **29th March 2006, 07:01 AM**

Thanks Arkay (and even more for your patience). I should have found it myself, as
I stumbled on it during browsing the fora. Crunchie is now working on increasing the
WAF! Thanks for this..

Regards, ceesvant

arkay · **29th March 2006, 01:36 PM**

No problems

Glad you got it sorted.

Cheers,

Arkay.

ceesvant · **31st March 2006, 08:16 PM**

Hello,

I discovered that there's a little bit more to this, thanks to you suggestions.
I had recorded some cartoons (Totally Spies) which I converted to XVID using Crunchie.
My system runs on a Athlon64 3200+ Venice CPU. I initially had Double Rate Deinterlacing turned on in Crunchie. When playing these vids I have the problem that
my MCE GUI hangs, or at least shows very slow response. When running MCE in a
window and having a CPU performance indicator also open, you see that the CPU
load goes to 100% on scene changes and when using FF/REW. Now when switching
the Double Rate Deinterlacing off and doing the same you see the CPU load jump to
100% only occasionally, even when FF/REW.

I think this Double Rate option takes too much from my CPU to handle the GUI
properly, causing it to either miss the remote commands or queue them for a
considerable time. It might also explain why other users haven't reported this
issue yet, as I think that 'normal' (i.e. non-graphic) material suffers a lot less
from scene changes than cartoon material. I will give that a try too and will let you
know.

Regards, ceesvant

arkay · **31st March 2006, 09:51 PM**

Yep, it certainly could be related to cartoon compression. There is actually a special mode in xvid under mencoder for doing cartoons... Can't remember what the command is now though.

At any rate playback of double rated material is always going to be stressful on the CPU as it is decoding twice the data per second. (Double the number of frames)...

I wouldn't be surprised if you have the same issues with a normal recording though I wouldn't call you CPU slow...

Cheers,

Arkay.