multimedia program weirdness

I'm about at my wits end trying to get media files to play on my CE6 minibook.

Audio files click and pop in every program (ceplayer, voplayer, nitrogen, gsplayer) except TCPMP and Coreplayer... but TCPMP and Coreplayer crash a lot.

Ceplayer (Windows Media Player 9, included with CE) plays wmv files, but jerkily, with lots of stops. If I try to play an avi file from my camera, it says "no video renderer" and just plays the audio track.

Voplayer plays videos, but locks up a ways into them, and goes full screen and repeats forever... and since it's preinstalled on my machines, the registry keys for it (including "repeat" seem to be read only.

Now here's the real weird part. I've tried installing and reinstalling various versions of Coreplayer and TCPMP. Most versions usually crash, but not always... but I've learned a few things:

Coreplayer always crashes with video set to DirectDraw, but GDI [sometimes] works. If I try to play an avi file, it crashes with "Unexpected Program failure. Please send crash.txt...". If I try to play a wmv file, it thinks about it for a bit, displays nothing, then the slider moves from the beginning to the end of the file. However, if I first try to play a wmv file and then play an avi file, surprise, surprise... the avi file plays without crashing! This works every time. Sometimes it locks up a ways into the video, though.

Coreplayer plays audio files, but eventually crashes. The day I was using it, eventually it crashed as soon as I loaded the program.

Now, TCPMP (the version from RTFM's programs zipfile). Installed it, and the first time or two the avi file played. Now (and I didn't change any settings), it crashes every time, no matter what file format.

This might be a stupid question but you're not using really hi rez files are you? how big are the files you're trying to play?

Not high res, my camera is 640x480, but the raw files from the camera are pretty large, I'm using the minibook to pull video from the cameras micro SD card while away from home so I can make room for more. Those may be upwards of 600MB. I also have trouble on shorter finished video, in the 50-100MB range.

I've never had any problems with sound or video on either of my ce5 or ce6 netbooks. The only issue i had was that i couldn't get coreplayer to stream audio or video (like youtube). I finally uploaded the dlls i used to get youtube working in coreplayer. I'm sure they aren't "all" needed as i was just tossing dlls into coreplayers folder randomly until it worked.

http://www.hostwork.com/users/matt/wince/coreplayerdlls.zip

Also i'd suggest trying in tcpmp and coreplayer to enable microdrive mode. It seems to have helped with buffering on my 2 devices.

Cheers.

I think dvd catalyst has a free trial (30 days probably) http://www.tools4movies.com try using one of those preset "file squash" settings and running your file through it. at 50-100MB my jornada is playing full length movies, if your files in that size are very short then your rez is probably too high for the thing to process.

As I said my videos are only 640x480, which shouldn't be a problem. I'm not looking to process or compress anything; I want to dump raw video from my camera to my minibook and review it immediately.

Been away all weekend, haven't had a chance to try RTFM's dlls yet... later today hopefully.

You might want to look again at the size of your AVI's. While there is theoretically little processing overhead, dumps straight from a DV camera are big not just in terms of total file length (which only matters if the software somehow needs to have the whole video in memory ... highly unlikely since you only have 128 MB-256 MB of RAM), but in terms of throughput or bitrates. The 640x480 doesn't mean what is does in still camera photography; you've got some (maybe alot) of data hiding behind that seemingly small number since it's probably 30 fps (even if you are recording 480 lines, 480i, much less cameras that have the aforementioend still resolution but up to 720p video...). My camera (which has the 640x480 still capture feature) records AVI's at 28Mbps. After processing to WMV format, it becomes a "mere" 1.6Mbps which is still huge by H/PC standards (which is down around 64 Kbps). Granted you are running it on a CE5/6 machine, but I don't have a good feel about how much more "advanced" the hardware is on these machines.

I don't think it's a file size issue; more likely it's something in the decoder, or how the decoder interfaces with the hardware (which could explain why I'm the only one who seems to have this problem). The part about Coreplayer crashing on avi's, unless I try to play a wmv first, even though the wmv doesn't play, is baffling, though. And TCPMP is working again, though I didn't change anything. It plays the avi, but unlike coreplayer, it also plays the wmv... but jerkily, just like WMP9. This makes sense as there's a dllpath registry entry for TCPMP (and coreplayer, for that matter) that points to the built in Windows dlls for wmv and wma (wmvdmod.dll and wmadmod.dll)... though it doesn't explain why coreplayer and TCPMP behave differently.

On the audio side, it's my understanding that the audio decoding for mp3 is built into one of the CE core dlls and that all the other audio players (except CP and TCPMP) use that, which explains why they all (except CP and TCPMP) behave the same with mp3s. I have no reason to believe the audio and video issues are in any related, though.

RTFM's dlls have no effect on video in CP, haven't tried them in TCPMP or for audio yet.

My camera is a dedicated micro video camera that records straight to a micro SD card, 640x480 at 30fps. Doesn't seem to be the amount of data that's the issue, since CP crashes instantly if I load an avi without loading a wmv first, but plays fine after first loading a wmv (any wmv, even though the wmv doesn't display).

There is a special TCPMP floating around here in a couple of posts on this site that has a few extra plugins. Did you try that version, or just "official" releases?
I don't know the specs of your minibook, but I recall issues with TCPMP with the Toshiba e800 and the Axim 51v, which both have a video acceleration chip. It might help by googling for that as well.

For troubleshooting purposes, you can try a few different recording options, different quality settings/screen resolution and see where it trips up.

I've tried numerous versions, including RTFM's which has all the extra plugins. My camera has absolutely no settings at all so I can't change anything there. I suppose it would be worthwhile to try an avi from another source, though, just to see what happens.

What's the bitrate of those AVI's from your camera? It still sounds like you are running out of memory or otherwise have memory issues. AVI is a container format; there's potentially alot of video and audio encoding hiding it in. Or said another way, AVI isn't a particularly standardized format (based on the variations I can run through MPxConverter).

640x480, 389MB, 15 minutes, 20 fps, 428 kbps (audio is 64kbps, 8 bit PCM).

Just tried Hum and Xaudio. Both load, but Hum can't seem to load any files, among other things it seems to have trouble with spaces in the filenames. Xaudio exhibits the same pops and clicks as the others.

That video rate works out at a sustained rate of > 1.1 MB/second. If the video isn't compressed there shouldn't be any stuttering, but decompressing and decoding combined could be the cause of your problems.

There's no stuttering with the AVI files; it just immediately crashes CP or TCPMP unless I play (or attempt to play) a wmv file first. Almost as if it doesn't know how to allocate memory or resources for the AVI, but it does for the WMV (even if it won't play it), and once allocated, things are OK?

When I get a chance I'll make a one second dummy wmv and try passing the filename as a command line parameter, so it always runs that first. Kludgy but I don't know what else to try.