Disk thrashing killing me

johnmeyer wrote on 3/12/2004, 1:51 PM
I have reported this problem before, but it seems to have gotten worse. I basically now can't use DVDA at all.

If I load a single 4.3 Gbyte MPEG file and its associated AC3 file into DVDA, my disk light flashes for about 30 seconds. If I then go to the timeline in DVDA and attempt to move back and forth (using the cursor keys, or clicking with the mouse -- it doesn't matter) the disk light comes on and the disk thrashes and thrashes, but nothing happens on screen for 10-20 seconds. Finally, the preview catches up and shows the video under the current cursor position.

It has the "feel" of a memory paging problem.

I have a 2.8 GHz P4, with 512 Mbytes of RAM memory, two 120 Gbyte IDE/ATA 7200 rpm drives, both of which have over 20 Gbytes free. My main disk (C:) that has the program files has 26 Gbytes free.

I should also note that if I change focus to another program, when I return focus to DVDA, the disk light comes on for about thirty seconds, and I can't do much until the light goes out.

Help!

Comments

farss wrote on 3/12/2004, 6:39 PM
Sounds to me like your mpeg files might be seriously fragmented. Every time DVDA looses focus it reloads everything which I agree is a pain, cannot see any reason why it does that, might be nice to have as an option but not each and every time.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/12/2004, 7:05 PM
Despite my recent posts about not needing to defragment, I am nonetheless going to do it on all my drives and see what happens. It looks like it will take overnight. We'll see what happens.
wobblyboy wrote on 3/12/2004, 7:49 PM
Have you recently defraged your disk? How full is your disk?
johnmeyer wrote on 3/12/2004, 10:55 PM
As I said in the original post, both 120 GByte disks have over 20 Gbytes free (51 Gbytes free on one; 39 Gbytes on the other).

Based on farss recommendations, I just defragged everything. As I expected, it made absolutely no difference.

This has been a problem for a long time, but only with DVDA. I have several dozen other appications, and they all work perfectly.

I tried doing a repair re-install of DVDA. That didn't help either.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/12/2004, 11:05 PM
Further information since my last post. I have done more testing, and the problem only seems to occur with MPEG files larger than 4 Gbytes. I don't know where the exact threshold is, but I had no problem with a 2.7 Gbyte file, but both files over 4 Gbytes were so sluggish, that I couldn't get any useful work done.

Postscript: After I wrote the above, I used one of my mpeg slice/dice tools to cut the file in half. With only the half the file size, everything works fine. I think I'm definitely hitting some data structure boundary.

Also, when I quit DVDA after having loaded the 4.3 Gbyte file, the disk light stays on for almost half a minute.
thier wrote on 3/17/2004, 9:55 AM
re: Disk activity after quitting DVDA

I'm sure that this is just a separate thread launched by DVDA to parse its way thru the MPEG so that it can display the timeline thumbnails. This is the same disk activity that you would see if you opened the MPEG and did not quit DVDA -- the separate thread allows you to overlap other actions in the program, so it's not as noticeable.

DVDA *should* simply cancel the thread before it exits, like any other well-behaved Windows app; this is clearly a program bug/oversight that Sony should be able to repair in the next service release.

I have experienced similar, sluggish, DVDA behavior when my MPEG2 files exceed about 2.5 hours in length, even though the file sizes are less than 4 GB. Symptoms include Scene Selection menus taking almost a minute to display in Preview mode; the further I go toward the end of the video, the longer *everything* takes (using a 3 gHz CPU with freshly-defragged disks).
It seems like DVDA is parsing the MPEG from the start of file to the current location for almost every action.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/17/2004, 11:07 AM
Glad to hear someone else report this. I am dealing with Sony tech support, but so far they haven't gotten beyone the "did you defragment your drive" response. Hopefully they'll get serious and escalate it. I am quite sure, just as you are, that this is a flaw in their design, one that definitely should be fixed before 2.0 hits the street.
RBartlett wrote on 3/17/2004, 3:28 PM
Me too!

90 minute project, 10GB maximum in preferences but I feel that is unrelated.
It has the appearance of DVDA successively approximating to the timeline position, as said, for the thumbnails. DVDA appears to be "counting frames" from the GOP. Something that Vegas is also pretty poor at with any codec that has interframe compression.

I suspect Sony need to get closer to MainConcept to sort this out. Perhaps there isn't too much long form work going on. Mine was a 90 minute MPEG-2 stream (VBR defaults for architect's PAL DVD of 6-8Mbps).

The waiting time on my 2GHz PIV (256MB PC1066 RDRAM) was about twice what I'd have been content with. My disc speeds are quick, 40-50MByte/sec across the entire geometry area and low fragmentation. The PC can capture uncompressed D1 to these drives without breaking into a sweat or me needing to consider any striping.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Spot suggests using AVI/DV inside DVD=A?
johnmeyer wrote on 3/17/2004, 8:05 PM
I hope Sony is looking at this thread. Their tech support didn't seem very aware of the problem. Let us hope that this is simply a minor disconnect between tech support and development and that a problem this horrendous isn't allowed to make its way into the next release.
DMitch wrote on 3/18/2004, 1:18 PM
Divx is .avi... but DVDA and Vegas won't deal with it! WHY!!!!!
I've tried to find a "Good" program that will convert [re-ecode] Divx .avi files to .mpeg-2 files, but I can't find any. When you give a Divx avi file to Vegas it takes it in but every frame is black. The audio doesn't work also, it is Fraunhofer IIS mpeg layer 3 codec and Vegas reports "Stream attributes cannot be determined:MPEG layer-3" I don't get it, it's a standard audio Codec
Roxio's DVD creator works fine with Divx and this Vegas - DVDA is ten times better. What's the problem???, Divx is everywhere now
johnmeyer wrote on 3/18/2004, 3:47 PM
Divx is .avi... but DVDA and Vegas won't deal with it! WHY!!!!!

If you want help on this, you might want to post it in a separate thread, since it is off topic. However, before you post, check out this thread:

having problems using mpeg-4 in Vegas. Help!
DMitch wrote on 3/24/2004, 12:51 AM
John,
Yes your right, I should have placed the question somewhere else and I did but with alot more to it. I'm also having problems with the audio and MPEG-Layer 3 not be reconized. here's the thread I put in Vegas -Audio area if you can help

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=19&MessageID=263605
johnmeyer wrote on 3/24/2004, 11:09 AM
Mitch,

You probably need to email their tech support (the link is at the top of this page under the "Support" button). I'm afraid I know nothing about Divx codecs. I tried installing them several times just to try to play back Divx movies and couldn't even get THAT to work. I am what most people would classify as a computer geek, and not being able to even get the Divx stuff to playback said to me that something was wrong on THEIR end. Obviously most people are able to get it work, but something is not quite right in the whole setup and installation of this technology.