XP Pro SP2 crashing

[Diesel]

Hi,

I have been using various mpeg2 encoders to convert my home movies to dvd format. They almost always crash part way through the job ie they say sorry they've got to close or the whole system goes blue screen then says it's recovered from a serious error. As i've tested several mpeg2 encoders and they all seem to do it i'm guessing it's not them and more likely to be something to do with my pc or the source avi's which are typically 13GB in size. I can supply details of the error messages if necessary. Any hints or guidance on where i should start on a troubleshooting mission much appreciated. Thanks diesel.

Software tried:
TMPGEnc
CCE
Mainconcept
QuEnc
ffmpeg
all fairly up-to-date versions

System:
Athlon 2000
ASRock K7VM2 R3.1
256MB DDR Kingston PC2100
40+80 Maxtor hard drives
Safecom USB wireless network adapter + other bits and bobs

[kryyst]

Your lack of ram isn't going to help the process, but I don't think it's responsible for the error, unless you are getting stack overflow errors. In which case - it is the lack of ram.

I would suggest trying something like Nero Ultra eddition to do your dvd encryption. I've tried most of the programs you've mentioned and Nero Ultra is worth the money. It will save you time and endless headache's. I'm normally not one to push commercial software, but there are times when certain tools are right for the job, and Nero is right for the job.

That though may not prevent the crashing. If you are compressing 13gb movie files you need at least that much more space to hold the working file. How much free hard drive space do you have on the destination drive for your conversion? Also have you defragged all your drives recently as that can cause issues in the process. I would also suggest killing any processes that you don't need while you are doing this. Compressing movies requires massive ammounts of computing power and the more you can provide the better. For this type of job don't dare touch your computer while it's working on them and expect a 13gb avi compression, bassed on your specs to probably take about a good day, maybe 2.

- the error message may also help.

[Diesel]

Thanks Kryyst,

Tried Nero 7 as you suggested which includes NeroVision 4; it ran through the encode faultlessly several times without crashing. The quality of the output I think is not as good as CCE and MainConcept; the color is a bit yellowy among other things but at least it works. I had nero set to highest quality which took about 5h to encode 50mins of dv.

Would still like to get the 'proper' encoders working one day ... !

Regards
diesel

[kryyst]

It's possible that the video quality is slightly less, though I've never compared them. Could be a few settings you can tweak to adjust the quality but again it'd be just a mater of playing around.