Russell May wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011 02:14:13 -0400, Paul wrote:

Russell May wrote:

I experimented a little more tonight. I played an AVI file in pivot
mode using Nero ShowTime again. After about 30 minutes, it locked up.
First about an 620Hz tone (E-flat) sounded. After a few seconds, about
a 470Hz tone (B-flat) and 390Hz tone (G) joined it. My perfect-pitch
wife identified the tones. The sound came from the PC speaker. I never
use that because I have external speakers. Hyper-threading was not
disabled after reset and reboot this time, so symptoms were a little
different from previously.

Russ

(Second attempt to send this...)

You may want to play with how the video is rendered.

For example. look for the word "Showtime" on this page.

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/ind...er&f=10&t=7755

They make reference to things like Hardware Overlay (typically you can only
have one of those running at a time on the computer), VMR7, or VMR9. The latter
two are part of Microsoft DirectX. It's possible you have a bug somewhere
in one of those modes, but not some other.

I can't tell you exactly where to look for those. I tried a Nero manual, but
the setting didn't seem to be in Nero. Some programs, when playing video, use
the same CODEC path as Windows Media Player might. And then, it is possible
the overlay setting for video rendering, is actually in some other place
than inside Nero itself. (Like a Windows Media Player preference.)

You can try changing the "Hardware Acceleration" slider for the display, like
turning it all the way down as a test. That might also result in an alternative
rendering plane being used for video.

Perhaps some change like that, will stop the crashing. It sounds like the
program itself is going nuts, or some data structure is overwriting program
code, and the program is jumping off into space. Each Windows OS, has developed
increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to stop that from happening (like NX
or No Execute bit for virtual to physical memory mapping), and those are
ways for the OS to stop something that has "jumped into space".

Paul

I tried reducing display Hardware Acceleration. The third level
disables DirectX, Direct3D, cursor, and advanced drawing
accelerations. That allows VLC and WMP to play an AVI file in pivot
mode. I don't know yet whether it will affect the lockup problem.

The Radeon 9000 box says it suports DirectX 8.1 but some program said
it was actually using DirectX 9. I thought that was Belarc Advisor,
but now Belarc Advisor says nothing about DirectX. Is there something
that I can use to report which version of DirectX is actually being
used? Might the version be important to this problem?

Incidentally, I do not have ATI's Crystal Control Center. I have the
ATI driver, ATI Control Panel, and Hydravision (even though I have
only one display, the Dell 2007FP). Windows Control Panel says the
latter two programs were last used on 11/9/2002.

Russ

Microsoft DirectX comes with it's own utility, called "dxdiag".

I tried it just now - Start, Run, dxdiag

and a window should open that says DirectX Diagnostic.

On the main "System" tab, mine says:

directX Version: DirectX 9.0c

As far as I know, DirectX can run on top of non-supporting hardware,
and a software routine may "fill in the gaps". For example, I had
an FX5200 video card on a couple systems, which was "almost DX9"
in hardware, but was missing several hardware features. As far as
I know, the machines had DirectX 9 running on them.

When a 3D game runs, it may have more than one rendering path offered
to it. On a system with DirectX 9 installed, the game nay be able to
run a DirectX 8 or DirectX 9 path, and the behavior of the game can
change considerably. For example, it might take more CPU to run the
DirectX 9 path. And some games don't even offer a preference, where
you can switch to the less demanding path.

So while the "dxdiag" utility will report the installed version of
DirectX, it may not report details about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

"The application programmer had to query the available hardware
capabilities using a complex system of "cap bits" each tied to
a particular hardware feature. For example, a game designed for
and running on Direct3D 9 with a graphics adapter driver designed
for Direct3D 6 would still work, albeit most likely with degraded
functionality."

Finding a program to view "cap bits" for OpenGL, seems to be easier
than for DirectX. Some games that use OpenGL, would even list the
extensions they detected. I don't recollect seeing that for DirectX
games.

HTH,
Paul