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Audio Skips and Video Freezes

 
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Vinay Kumar Raj
New Member

Audio Skips and Video Freezes

Hi,
I have a DV5052ea laptop and the audio skips and videos freeze whenever I play one of the files using one of the follwing application's windows media player, VLC, itunes, realplayer.

I did roll back and unistalled and reinstalled the drivers for the video and audio card...this did not solve the issue ...

now it's happened for the third time. The first time I had to do a system recovery and the second time system restore. I just wanted to know that the Hard drive free space in my laptop is only 702MB in my C: and 3.18GB in my E:. Now could shortage of space be the reason behind this occuring?? should I give 4095Mb as my page file size?? and Is there any other means of sloving this problem other than sytem restore/ recovery.?

Thanx,
Raj
9 REPLIES 9
franckbu
New Member
Solution

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

Your problem does seem to indicate a lack of space, especially if your drives are heavily fragmented. Usually, the software decoders which come with the media players you mentionned, require that they expand the video or sound file to double or sometimes triple the size it usually is (that's what the CODECS compressors/decompressors are used for for the most part)

Assuming that your hard drive is heavily fragmented, where even though you may have 2Gb of free space showing, but that space in nothing but short segments of contiguous clusters on on your storage device. You are causing the heads on your hard drive to travel so far from segment of the media to another that the player has no other recourse but to wait for the hard drive to catch up.

Here are some possible solutions for you:

* let the windows manage your page file while you defragment
* Get a decent defragmenter (diskeeper, O&O defragmenter, etc..) and fully defragment your storage space, in order to acquire the most free space possible
*compress folders of documents which you do not use often
*Clean up your hard drive and get rid of all the tmp, bak, chk, and whatever other files maybe cluttering up your system
*make sure you have the latest drivers for your motherboard chipset, and storage drive controller
* move your temp directory to a drive which does not contain your windows installation, and ultimately, it wouldn't hurt for it to be the only thing on the drive (i.e. an cheap 30 Gb drive would be nice assuming that it is at least 7200RPM and ATA133
*if you have PATA controlled devices, make sure that you do not set up the CDROM as a master. CDROMs and DVD/ROM should always be setup as slaves unless they are alone on the controller
*After you have regained all the space on your storage device, set windows to use no paging file, reboot, defragement your drive one last time, and have windows make use of a paging file which has it's min and max equal to 1.5 times the amount of available RAM. More is just a waste.

If those things don't work for you, I recommend buying an IPod!! :-)

Good luck!!
Ronald Postma
Honored Contributor

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

Hi Viney,
All good ideas stated above, both your partitions are on one disk I presume in a laptop or is the other partition on a second external disk?

Before you do a defrag clean first (also delte your temporary internet files)

Also if you have more room on the other partition, you can move the swapfile to that partition. (Do not do this on external disks)

Best is to let windows manage the swapfile size, but if you want to see if there are some positive changes if you manage it yourself. start with a the minimum size of 1.5x the ammount of Ram and the maximum 3x the ammount of RAM

Besides the newest drivers for your video, sound and chipset, did you isntall the newest directX9c
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

are the problems accouring only if you play fles from CD? or also from HD?

Have a nice day,
HTH, Ronald
The logic of Microsoft: "Press START to shut down the pc"
Alan_152
Honored Contributor

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

check drivers, firmware, physical memory, total memory (including swap), available drive space, and fragmentation.

Your swap file size, according to many, ought to be 4095min, 4095max on your fastest drive. Right now, though, you don't have enough free drive space anyware for that and are probably fragmented besides. I would do the following:

1) get into safe mode
2) set the swap file to 0/0
3) delete pagefile.sys
4) do a good disk cleanup, including getting rid of programs, temp files, caches, backups, etc that you don't need,
5) defrag
6) reset the swap file to 4095/4095
7) reboot

You may also want to consider getting a much bigger hard drive for the future. You can pick up a 100GB laptop drive for about $0.50 a gig or less now if you look carefully.
Vinay Kumar Raj
New Member

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

My friends,
Thanks for all the effort that you guys had taken to mail me. I appreciate it very much
The issue is that I had followed the following steps.

> safe mode
>let windows manage the page file
>cleaned up the HD
> installed the lastest drivers
>set windows to no paging file
>set the swap file to 0/0
>defragmented using the windows defragmenter tool
>reset the swap file to 4095-4095max

But none of these have resolved the issue my audio still skips when being played from the HD and the video freezes

I apologize for the late reply its just that my comp was not running.

I have no clue on what has to be done next.

Please help me . The laptop is still in warranty and I will be using it to get this issue rectified. If this ca be solved without using the warranty please do let me know

Thank's a Lot!!
Vinay
Alan_152
Honored Contributor

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

The only other things I can think of right off hand is that you (1) have a data transfer problem from your hard drive that might be taken care of by installing a faster hard drive with more cache, or (2) that you have an IRQ sharing conflict between your video card and some other unknown device.
William E Howard
Regular Advisor

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

I've run into situations like this before. Does this only happen when the video is in full screen mode, or does it also happen during normal window mode? Also, have you checked your resource management while playing video? Make sure you're not choking your CPU or running out of Ram?

Another option you might want to look into is a total refresh of codecs. Remove DivX, XviD, FFDShow, and any other codec packs you have installed, then do a clean reinstall of the codecs you need with latest versions.

The fact that the audio is skipping as well as the video is what leads me to believe this is a resource problem, but codecs can also be involved there as well.

You also might want to try and use a different player, such as Media Player Classic (http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/). WMP and VNC can sometimes be resource hogs.
Vinay Kumar Raj
New Member

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

Hi all,
The problem has been solved I repaired the OS in C: and installed the lastest Codecs. Looks like I had a problem with the Codecs. Now when I play the file in Windows media player 11 / any other player its working fine. and my HD free space in C: is 23GB so looks Like the issue is solved.

Thanks a LOT!!

Vinay
Ronald Postma
Honored Contributor

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

Hi Raj,
Glad it solved, have fun wathing videos. If you ever have another question do not hasitate to ask.

Regards, Ronald
The logic of Microsoft: "Press START to shut down the pc"
madana prasad
New Member

Re: Audio Skips and Video Freezes

I am so impressed with the tech savvies helping one other here ... Great to be around here ..