WMV Playback Corruption

[Gandalfthewhite]

what gurm said oh and yes a new version of FFDshow came out a few days ago that fixed some major bugs in it

[The PIT]

Gurm blaming the users as first response isn't being helpful either. Old G the grey tends to do that first of all automatically hence my response. Couldn't see anyone blaming ATI either before G's post.

Step one doesn't apply no third party codecs installed.

Step two doesn't apply.

Step three could give it a go sometime when I've got another non working file. Chances are I won't see one now for a bit.

Step four. Never done any good so far but what the heck.

[rbV5]

Step four. Never done any good so far but what the heck.

Wrong, the Catalyst Crew Reports are the primary way to report Catalyst Issues, and the #1 way to get those issues fixed. I can't stress that enough....IF YOU FIND AN ISSUE WITH CATALYST DRIVERS PLEASE...PLEASE SEND A REPORT TO THE CATALYST CREW. ATI does not regularly browse these forums, the Catalyst Crew reports are definately their priority. Even if you don't think its doing any good, I assure you it most definately is.

The beta testers rely on user feedback as well. MANY times issues that first appear in this forum are reproduced and sent off, so its important that you also post here....even when you don't seem to ge the answer you want to hear (or it seems like the beta testers are a little short) I've sent off several reports of issues that I first saw here, and then found that I could reproduce it.

*Send the report to the Catalyst Crew
*Post in this forum

I appreciate it I'm an enthusiast, and I want these issue fixed myself. I can tolerate upset posting from users that are having issues, nobody likes their stuff to not work right, and no issue is more important than the one you're having.

[Gandalfthewhite]

Originally Posted by Gandalfthewhite

i love how ppl dont read the thread they just post and say its ATI s fault

TRY RESTTING OVERLAYS TO DEFAULT

TRY UNINSTALLING THE FFDSHOW FILTER

both seem to work for people

that wasnt yelling that was highlighting as ppl choose to ignore posts most imes also yes someone did blame it on ATI before i even posted that

and its G the white try and get right (wow that rhymes )


also ATI doesnt have to look at these forums they do have to look at those feedback reports and we have seen some of the numbers for problems getting reported by ppl on these boards ppl wonder why a 25 page bug doesnt get fixed maybe it was the fact taht only about 15 ppl actully reported it

[Gurm]

Let me explain, just a wee tiny bit that doesn't violate my NDA, how we as beta testers can be helpful to y'all.

Let's say you send in a bug report. Now if you are the ONLY person that sends one in, yeah it'll get... swallowed up in the rising tide of people sending in BUG REPORTS because they want a few more FPS out of Doom3.

Now on the other hand if EVERYONE who experiences a problem sends in a bug report, it'll get more attention.

But let's say that you post here after filing your bug report. First of all, if it's on Spyre's list, odds are good that ATI knows about it. Will they fix it? If it's something like THIS they certainly will. So if we say that it's a known issue, while that is small consolation, you can rest assured that ATI _does_ know about it.

Also, we keep track of a lot of solutions for things... not that a lot of other people here don't, but if there's an esoteric solution or a driver mixing/matching solution, I bet we will know about it - and it might already be in Omega's latest driver set.

Last but not least, if you don't PISS US OFF, if I say I'm testing something, and then post back confirming that it happened... then that means _I_ have submitted a bug report on it. Now, let's not get into the potential politics of whether my bug report carries more weight than yours, but rather rest assured that I have more recent drivers than you do, more setups than you do, that when I say I've tested something I've really tested it on known good setups that don't have ancillary problems, and that now it's on a list.

None of this does you any good in getting the problem fixed TODAY, of course. But it DOES help to be NICE in here, both to ATI and to us beta testers. Usually we are prevented by our agreement from saying things like "issue X is fixed in our drivers so you ought to see that fix on date Y", but there are a wealth of possibilities for getting things fixed.

Now, back to the CURRENT topic:

If you have the BLACK screen, step 3 above WILL WORK to fix your issue. That's a known goof-up, the settings are wrong when 4.10 is installed, and you can fix it quite simply. If you have the weird technicolor corruption... we're working on nailing that down, although it's tough because none of us testers, to date, have seen it!

That illustrates another potential problem and misunderstanding.

We are not, in any way, suggesting that people don't sometimes have reproducible problems... but rather that, given the number of cards that just a couple of beta testers have installed... if a couple of us test something and say "don't see that here", you can bet that there's something specific to YOUR MACHINE that is causing the problem. That doesn't mean that there aren't hundreds of people out there with the same misconfiguration or piece of 3rd party software that we don't use, but rather that it is likely something that is not STRICTLY driver-related.

So if you say "hey all my WMV's go all funky colored" and Spyre and Gandalf and I all say "ours don't", you can pretty much assume that - were you willing to go to the trouble - a clean install would resolve your issue. Now clearly not everyone wants to clean install every time they update their video drivers, that would be silly. But what this means is that a clean install of the drivers in a variety of setups DON'T reproduce the problem, so it's something inherent to YOUR setup (and maybe the setup of a bunch of other people, ATI's installed userbase is of course quite sizable).

Ok, I've rambled enough. But I hope this has helped SOME of you understand a little bit of the process here.

[Creator441]

Hi,

Just wanted to add my information on the subject. I just sent a CATALYST Crew report about the WMV playback corruption problem. Here are my main system's specs:

AMD Athlon64 3400+
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe Motherboard (nForce 3 250Gb chipset)
1GB Corsair DDR400 System RAM
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
ATI X800 XT Platinum Edition

I'm new to the ATI world and I just installed the card using the 4.10 CATALYST drivers (with CCC). Upon reboot all worked fine in games but then my last test, the WMVHD (which is kinda important for me, one of the major reasons of my upgrade) was all garbled. Seems to only show primary colors (CYAN, RED, BLUE, etc.).

I tried the 4.9 and 4.6 CATALYST drivers and all was fine in WMVHD without changing anything and with using Norton GHOST to return to previous state (and clean ATI drivers for sure). I also tried the 4.11Beta drivers and all was fine but those beta drivers does not seem to include the Rage Theatre drivers because using GHOST to clear up ATI drivers and installing only 4.11b did not recognize the Rage Theatre chip. Surely the Rage Theatre chip is used for Overlay video playback in Windows (even on monitor)? If someone could confirm that I'd be grateful. So mainly, when I say it worked with 4.11b is because when I tried the 4.11b the FIRST time I did a simple uninstall of 4.9 followed by an install of 4.11b, which probably means the 4.11b were in use for the 2D/3D normal chip and the 4.9 for rage theatre chip (which is not bugged for WMVHD) at that time.

My humble opinion on this is that ATI maybe put something about their upcoming WMVHD hardware acceleration to ON in the 4.10 drivers? But I read in a previous post in this thread that the wdm drivers (what is wdm? seems related to overlay video or something?) are identical from 4.9 to 4.10 so I don't know. The fact that only WMV HD are corrupt and no other one including standard wmv, divx (avi's) real media and others seems to point to WMVHD specifically.

Also I did not try the return to default or uninstall of ffdshow (which I have installed a month ago) so that may help but since I did too much tests already I decided I will wait on official 4.11 (which by the way helps on fps in doom3 and 3dmarks05 according to betas! ).

Creator.

[Gandalfthewhite]

Gurm great post

creator the reason their is no WDM drivers in hte beta is just that its a hotfix beta meaning no ACE or WDM drivers

also the only things that changed from 4.9 to 4.10 were the old CP and the drivers. WDM and ACE are the same builds in both sets (just double checked this) i would definetly try uninstallling FFDshow and restting the overlay settings i mean it takes all of ten minutes to do and it could fix the problem instead of having to wait a month for a new driver

[Gurm]

Thanks, Gandalf.

I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions about the beta testers and the bug fixing process. I'm tempted to write a sticky, only I think it would most likely be ignored.

[Creator441]

Ok Gandalf thanks for the informations and for double checking the changes, I will try the ffdshow uninstall and resetting overlay soon and post results here. But just to be sure I will do what you mean, by resetting to defaults you mean press the "DEFAULTS" button (I think that's the name of the button) in the overlay tab under Video in the CCC? I mean where you can change brightness, color, hue, etc? I press DEFAULTS button that is on that tab on bottom of that page?

Also, I know it's off topic but for my information, what does the "ACE" part of catalyst driver do/control?

Thanks!

Creator.

[spyre]

ACE was the codename for the CCC during development and some people still use the name prefering it over the CCC name

[Gurm]

<Rant about the name CCC removed.>

<Rant about the similarities between the marketing department of ATI and the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation removed.>

<Rant about lack of availability of good unabridged copies of the Encyclopedia Galactica removed.>

<Rant about why Douglas Adams had to die at such a young age WHILE AT THE GYM not ever written, but EXPRESSLY IMPLIED.>

[MindlessOath]

ahem.... i have been at driverheaven helping out over their for a long while. i found a solution to this, or most likly have for a large majority of people.


1. DOWNLOAD Windows MEDIA player 10 - www.windowsupdate.com or www.microsoft.com -- see WMV acceleration is fixed (i do belive at least it is in 8.07 version) but it only works if windows media player 10 is installed, else it messes with some things, so some bugs still have to be worked out, like for instance, in ATI's installer it should enable the setting for WMV acceleation enabled or dissabled depending on the registry settings' that tell us if wmp10 is installed or not. - next a function added to the control panel itself to check if WMP10 is installed if a users checks the wmv accel box. could be a simple IF statement. duh :P

2. disable WMV acceleration and then reboot. only after rebooting will it dissable it. remember u must be in the administrator account before doing this i belive.

3. use something better, and make sure not to download huge amounts of useless codecs. - i myself have about 4 codecs installed. - divx, xvid, a free real media, and a free quick time codec (and i think annother one i dont remember). - u might ask how i play other movies that need other codecs.... well i have millions of movies and with just those codecs i play them all, and their all in differnt formats because i use an awesome media player.
MEDIA PLAYER CLASSIC. this can be found from sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

the only downfall to this media player is that it doesnt include a playlist which some people like to use ZOOM player - which isnt as good but its often updated and has a playlist.

[Gandalfthewhite]

smacks had mindlessoath very good point on windows mdeia player 10 i updated to it the day it came out so i forgot the fact that ppl might be on 9

creator yes i mean the defualts button under video options

[Gurm]

Well I agree that ATI seems to have gooned big time on the installer for 4.10 not detecting and/or setting things properly.



Anyway, if anybody finds a media player that has a GOOD playlist AND good functionality - I'd love to hear about it. MPC is great but as mentioned has no playlist...

Also I really wish that the author of QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative would make his codecs directshow compliant so that players OTHER than MPC could use them.

[ronerik]

Upgrading to WMP 10 fixed it for me.

[MindlessOath]

/me slaps around the beta testers.
and ATI for their mistakes

Does CCC even have a checkmark for WMV acceleration?

lets make up a situation...

a user doesnt have wmp10 at all, so when they install it, the new installer (4.11 drivers) detect that the user doesnt have it, so it dissables the function.

now what is that user to do if he updates to wmp10? if their is no checkmark he has no other option. unless something is hardcoded into the control panel every time it loads to check the registry? or add a checkmark to enable/disable the the option would work, and when the CCC loads it should "disable" the checkmark so the user cannot check or uncheck it unless wmp10 is installed (a note next to it should state "* WMP10 is required for this function to work").

enjoy

[Jager]

I had jacked up wmv playback aswell and fixed it by downloading...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...cdownload.aspx

I didn't have to uninstall ffdshow either.

[Below 30]

It is very much advised not to install 4.10. Now my WMP 9 cannot play back mp3 or wmv or wav. files. It says that it encountered an un identified error. If it does play a wav file, there is no sound.

4.10 seems to corrupt a registry file/files, that permanently screws up WMP9. I'm back to CAT4.8 is what I'm saying and I can't play these files anymore. I do not blame ATI, I blame myself, for upgrading when I didn't have a problem with 4.8. Now this is the price I pay, but for those who are reading this and didn't commit yet, do not get 4.10.

ATI use to have a warning on the DL site only to update if you have a problem. They should put that warning back up.

[Mr Mean]

Originally Posted by DaCypher

Now that I have installed v4.10 my WMV video files playback with completely distorted colors (shapes are hardly recognizable in the videos). I have this trouble regardless of whether I have WMV Acceleration enabled or not in Display Propeties | Settings | Advanced | Options. The only workaround I have found was to goto Tools | Options | Performance | Video acceleration section of Windows Media Player v9 and set the slider bar all the way to the left (no video acceleration). I have yet to find a similar option in Media Player Classic (which I prefer over WMP). Any help regarding this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks...

Is the video card overclocked?

[Gandalfthewhite]

try getting windows media player 10

Originally Posted by Below 30

It is very much advised not to install 4.10. Now my WMP 9 cannot play back mp3 or wmv or wav. files. It says that it encountered an un identified error. If it does play a wav file, there is no sound.

4.10 seems to corrupt a registry file/files, that permanently screws up WMP9. I'm back to CAT4.8 is what I'm saying and I can't play these files anymore. I do not blame ATI, I blame myself, for upgrading when I didn't have a problem with 4.8. Now this is the price I pay, but for those who are reading this and didn't commit yet, do not get 4.10.

ATI use to have a warning on the DL site only to update if you have a problem. They should put that warning back up.

[MindlessOath]

i guess below 30 has a problem reading. READ BOY!

[Creator441]

Ok, seems like this thread generated some new solutions for WMV corruption problem... nice

Before I begin, let me state that I still have WMP9 installed and for a reason, just read more to find out why.

For Gandalf... I did the 4.10 reinstall with uninstall of ffdshow BEFORE installing 4.10 and also AFTER (2 tests), still using ghost images to return to 100% no ATI drivers. It did not solve the technicolor problem. I also pressed DEFAULTS to return overlay to defaults a lot and it also did not correct the WMVHD corruption problem.

I tried the WM9CodecPack suggested by Jager and it did solve the WMV corruption problem BUT in my humble opinion the playback was not as smooth as before installing the codec pack. When you install the codec pack, the title of the window is named Windows Media Player 10. I have Windows Media Player 9 installed so maybe that explains why the playback was not as smooth after the codec install.

I am not upgrading yet to Windows Media Player 10 because my friend told me the Terminator 2 WMVHD protected by a license won't run if you install WMP10 (because of the crappy recognition scheme the InterActual crap thinks you dont have "Windows media player 9" ) It only runs if WMP9 is installed. I will watch that movie and probably go to WMP10 later.

So I reverted to 4.9 drivers for now as they are quite stable in everything for me so far. I used the non CCC version this time though since for me at least, the CCC is way too slow responses and crashes (.NET exceptions not catched error panels).

Hope ATI corrects the little problem they did on WMP9, else well I will have to go to WMP10 to correct the new driver versions, which is not too cool imho for a driver. It should be corrected, it's probably minor?

Thanks.

Creator.

[yentil]

It Hapened To Me To I Jus Unticked Ewmv Aceleration In Dispay Optoin And Then Its Normal Also I Dont Use Ms Wmp Bloatcrap I Use Wmp Classic It Kix Ass

[DaCypher]

Originally Posted by Mr Mean

Is the video card overclocked?

Nope, completely stock ATI Radeon 9600 Pro.

[DaCypher]

Also, I would like to reiterate that a reboot is necessary after you uninstall ffdshow codecs (maybe Gurm could add this as step 2.5), I believe this may not be necessary with older versions of ffdshow, but better to go ahead and reboot anyways. I found that my problem persisted even after an uninstall of ffdshow until I reboot.

[Creator441]

DaCypher, I did reboot after ffdshow uninstall to no avail.

yentil, true wmp classic is kinda cool but the wmv problem appears in both of them (MS and classic) as it is codec related imho.

Creator.

[xsvcd]

Originally Posted by Creator441

I am not upgrading yet to Windows Media Player 10 because my friend told me the Terminator 2 WMVHD protected by a license won't run if you install WMP10 (because of the crappy recognition scheme the InterActual crap thinks you dont have "Windows media player 9" ) It only runs if WMP9 is installed. I will watch that movie and probably go to WMP10 later.

Just go to this link and look for the patch. Once you install the patch you should be good to go. I don't have any problems with it anymore.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...ght=terminator

[ryoohki]

Originally Posted by Creator441

Ok, seems like this thread generated some new solutions for WMV corruption problem... nice

Before I begin, let me state that I still have WMP9 installed and for a reason, just read more to find out why.

For Gandalf... I did the 4.10 reinstall with uninstall of ffdshow BEFORE installing 4.10 and also AFTER (2 tests), still using ghost images to return to 100% no ATI drivers. It did not solve the technicolor problem. I also pressed DEFAULTS to return overlay to defaults a lot and it also did not correct the WMVHD corruption problem.

I tried the WM9CodecPack suggested by Jager and it did solve the WMV corruption problem BUT in my humble opinion the playback was not as smooth as before installing the codec pack. When you install the codec pack, the title of the window is named Windows Media Player 10. I have Windows Media Player 9 installed so maybe that explains why the playback was not as smooth after the codec install.

I am not upgrading yet to Windows Media Player 10 because my friend told me the Terminator 2 WMVHD protected by a license won't run if you install WMP10 (because of the crappy recognition scheme the InterActual crap thinks you dont have "Windows media player 9" ) It only runs if WMP9 is installed. I will watch that movie and probably go to WMP10 later.

So I reverted to 4.9 drivers for now as they are quite stable in everything for me so far. I used the non CCC version this time though since for me at least, the CCC is way too slow responses and crashes (.NET exceptions not catched error panels).

Hope ATI corrects the little problem they did on WMP9, else well I will have to go to WMP10 to correct the new driver versions, which is not too cool imho for a driver. It should be corrected, it's probably minor?

Thanks.

Creator.

It will pop for a patch once you get the license or start the software. I did it and it pop you a window to download to patch right away.. Thurst me i've tried and it work great!

[MindlessOath]

Originally Posted by Creator441

DaCypher, I did reboot after ffdshow uninstall to no avail.

yentil, true wmp classic is kinda cool but the wmv problem appears in both of them (MS and classic) as it is codec related imho.

Creator.

i do belive that media player classic has differnt rendering modes in the options section. so you can change it to whatever u please for less problems. enjoy that info, since the player is such a good player it offers so many differnt options

[Below 30]

Some people seem to think that it's cool to install a graph driver and then have to update to another WMP version, to play your files that worked, before the graph driver update. I don't think it's cool and never will. When I install a graph driver, I want to keep using my normal WMP.

For those that understand what I'm about, I fixed my WMP 9. I deleted all instances of "Media Player" in the registry I could find (Windows XP). First, I backed up my registry though. Then I rebooted and re-installed WMP9 (after deleting the instances in the registry). Now I got pictures and sound again. That is the last Catalyst I'm installing for a very long time (sticking with 4.8) , I've learned.

Look under "Microsoft" then "Media Player" in each of the 4 or five main folders in the Registry list and delete the "Media Player" folder, if you see it. *Caution* Use registry editor at your own risk and always back-up first.

WMP 6.4 can't play wma. and wmv. and i almost thought I'd have to re-install windows. Good save.