Those were pretty useless responses... If it worked before it should work now. Playing back an mpeg-2 @ DVD res is no problem for a 1ghz machine.

If it ran mpeg-2's before & not now try rendering one from your old version of Vegas. See if that one has any issues. I'd also check for anything else you may of installed at the same time as vegas. Could be an AV update is now scanning your video files.

My desktop is an i5 650. I updated my specs thanks. It's a new offline machine dedicated to editing, video and film capture. The film capture software only runs on 32bit OS for now, so that's what i'm using for now... The PC is still super fast.

I did a test last night. First I rendered a 5 min spliced clip to an MPEG2 using Vegas 8.0 and it played back fine without any hang ups. Then I opened the same file with Vegas 10 and rendered a 5 min spliced clip. The Vegas 10 clip stuck and skipped over a few frames (duration is about a second for this error) 2 times in under 5 minutes. All I can think is to uninstall and reinstall. Any ideas?

Download another player (like VLC or something -- I'm not sure what to recommend) and see if the pause occurs in the new player. I had a similar "freeze" issue a while back and it went away when I changed to a different player (VLC).

At the time I had a new machine -- i5 760 Win7 Pro 64Bit, and running Vegas 10b 64-bit. I had rendered a video (from DV source to MPEG2 for DVD) that was about 8 minutes long, and in Windows Media Player at one particular scene -- very low motion, in fact -- there was about a 1/2 second freeze or glitch, though the audio continued fine. Same MPEG clip brought back onto a Vegas timeline played through just fine.

I re-rendered the original file and it happened again at the same, exact spot.

I had seen a comment here on the forums about issues with Win Media Player, so I downloaded another player and my MPEG clip played fine, without the hitch (and still had the glitch in Win MP). I don't recall if I ever actually rendered the clip to a DVD, though. It was an upload for YouTube.

Root Cause? I don't know. Either the Main Concept encoder has a glitch of some kind and Windows Media Player chokes on it while others handle it gracefully, or perhaps the MPEG file is perfectly fine and legal and it is the Windows Media Player itself that has a problem.

Thanks, I have VLC player but it plays real wavey on that machine. I don't think it's the media player because the glitches stay in place when I burn to a DVD and watch it on my TV. I have the Main Concept encoder installed... and I don't get the problem with Vegas 8 on the same machine with the same files.

If i can just add to this, i had the same problem using Windows Media Player. Renders were stuttering like a half second freeze during playback and i was at first thinking it was Vegas rendering badly. Turned out it was WMP! now i play all my renders back using AVS player. Free and reliable. Problem gone.

Paul

It can't be the media player for me, because the problem persists on an authored DVD.

It can't be the media player for me, because the problem persists on an authored DVD.

Is the problem at the same place every time? If yes, it sounds like a problem with the source media.

Since encoding is a not-realtime operation, there is no reason for a "sticky playback" to be introduced by Vegas or DVDA. (I'm not sure if there is an antonym for the term "real time".) In other words, the rendering (or encoding) frames of video is linear. One frame is finished before the processor moves on to the next frame. If you have a slow PC, it could take a second per frame, and your ten-minute encode would take five hours. Trust me, I've seen it on a quad-core PC encoding a six-minute video with a *LOT* of FX. BUT, there's no way the encoding process can introduce an error (in normal operations).

An example of a real-time operation is DV or HDV capture from tape. The deck or camera spits out the data at 5MBPS, whether the PC or hard-disk is ready for it. (This is how you get dropped frames).

Back to your problem.... If the problem presents itself at the same point in the video, try just encoding that section to see if it is still there.

"Is the problem at the same place every time? If yes, it sounds like a problem with the source media"

Yes and No. The problem IS in the same spot when playing the rendered file, whether on WMP or DVD. If I reopen the file in the time line it plays back smooth all the way through, and when I try to cut or alter scenes at the glitchy spot, the glitch just occur randomly somewhere else on the rendered file.

My desktop is a i5 650 and renders very fast. I still have Vegas 8.0 on the same PC and don't get the same problem when i edit and render the same captured files.

Having Vegas 10.c 64 bit and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

I write this because it seems that several drivers etc are the same in Skratch's Vista and in Windows 7.

Returned from a longer holiday some days ago - and when I restarted the machine I let it do the Windows updates.

I always render to mpeg-2 1080i at 25 Mbps - and it has always played well on my 2 x Xeon quads.

BUT: as I played something the first time now it went totally wrong. Sound stutters badly and the video hangs for up to 2-3 seconds. It always occurs at places where there is much movement or change of scene in the video.

Have seen this behaviour with Windows Media Player after some recent updates - and changed to VLC - but it also stutters and hangs now.... have tried the advanced setting with different codecs and output paths - but no help.

The CPU utilization is as low as 3 percent - so this is not the bottleneck. Have tried to store the video on another physical disk - also on a net-disk (NAS) and gave WMP a 5 seconds buffer - but also no help.

Wonder what Microsoft has changed in the last updates and if maybe a new graphics card with more internal memory might help (still running an old ATI HD 2600 XT).

Strange, btw. that Vegas itself previews these passages totally smoothly and with no problems.

I suspect this has nothing to do with your PC or Vegas directly.
I've seen this problem several times.
What are your min, average and maximum bitrate settings for the mpeg-2 encode?

I'd suggest you try encoding the section at 8Mbps CBR and see how that plays out on your PC and STB DVD player.
Typically this problem occurs with the ratio between min and max bitrates is too high or it could also happen if you use CBR and the bitrate is too high.

One other thought. Check that you're encoding in V8 and V10 at the same bitrates then compare then encoded file sizes, they should be very close to being the same.

Bob.

I have a client who always has a problem when they play a DVD I made on a specific computer. Never fails.

For the computer though, could be the AV, could be an update. Ever since a MS update I made to XP in the last week or so, things seem to run more sluggish. IE Vegas takes forever to open, things soft-freeze more often (especially when I run more then one program). Could be time for a reinstall of XP (haven't done it since 08). If you can narrow down what was done to the computer at the time it started you could find the cause.

I use Media Player Classic for my media player. I don't like VLC. It slow to open, doesn't show the video unless it's playing & other small annoying things. I don't have any issues playing things with MPC, I don't know if I would with Windows Media Player because I don't use it.

I've been rendering to 8bit. I wonder if it has to do with the Neat Video plug in? WHen i loaded V10, I still has the older version of Neat Video and it caused some crashes at first. Then i updated neat Video to V10. The plugin worked fine after that, but maybe it caused a curruption of some kind?

The PC is only 6 months old, not used for internet and not much installed except video capture and edit software.

"I've been rendering to 8bit"
That's all you can encode to mpeg-2.

" The plugin worked fine after that, but maybe it caused a curruption of some kind? "
Anything is possible but it's highly unlikely that is the source of your problem.

You problem is very likely related to the bitrate. I'll ask again, what bitrate settings are you using for the mpeg-2 encode?

Bob.

Thanks Bob. The bitrates are set the same for V8 and V10. Max is 9,500,000 Min is 192,000 with an average of 6,000,000. Everything else appears to be set identically too. However I just ran some more tests and your right, It does have to be something about the MPEG in V10 because AVI's from V10 play back fine. MPEG from V8 are working fine.... only MPEG in V10 is doing this.

Max is 9,500,000 Min is 192,000 with an average of 6,000,000."

Without some specialist tools it's impossible to know what the actual encoded bitrates are to really diagnose what is going on.
There was a thread recently about mpeg-2 encoded file sizes being different in V10 compared to previous Vegas versions.

What I'd suggest you do it to increase the minimum bitrate to say 3,000,000 and decrease the maximum to 8,000,000 and see what happens.

In my experience 192,000 is too low compared to the average of 6,000,000. I always try to keep the minimum at no less than 1/3 of the average.

Bob

Skratch - try rendering to AVI and play it on your PC. Is that clean?

Steve- I did do a test render of an AVI and it was clean.

I tried setting the bit rates to 8,000,000 and 3,000,000 and still had some frame freezes in the clips. I dunno, Vegas 8.0 doesn't have this problem so something must be currupt. I might do a reinstallation if i get get it to stop. Anyone else have this problem?

Someone noticed that Vegas 10's DVD mpeg2 templates have a buffer number different then the recommended. It doesn't have a 0, so instead of 320 (I think) it's 32. That could be the issue.

Nobody could get that value to change. It might not really matter for DVD's & that's why nobody noticed it right away.

" It might not really matter for DVD's & that's why nobody noticed it right away. "

That's a good thought but the OP is having the same problem if he makes the mpeg file into a DVD and plays it on a STB. Something is wrong in the encoded file and I've run out of ideas.
Unless someone else can think of something my best advice would be to refer the problem to support.

Bob.