05-26-2008, 08:13 PM
Wall of sob-story text follows. tl;dr. I'm posting this here on the off-chance that someone knows what I'm talking about. I've looked online, I've tried, but no one ever seems to be describing or experienced these specific symptoms.
I do a clean install of WinXP. Great. All patches, latest ATI drivers, mmm-hmm, good. Defrag, all the stuff you do after a reformat. Yeah, got it.
Install Steam. Get TF2 installed. Launch it. Okay, now, the Valve "dooooooo, dooooooooo, doom bakadoom bakadoom bakadoom" FMV with the faucet-guy. You know what I'm talking about? Okay, that plays *fine*. I'm talking about intro movies, FMVs, whatever you want to call them. They play smoothly, they play correctly, woo-hoo. Any game. Oblivion, yes. Note I'm still talking about "FMVs".
Now, at some point, I'm going to do something, and that causes something else to break.
Issue: FMVs begin to have an intermittent but very regular stutter in the audio. No, not the video. The audio. The stutter is like a square wave with a low frequency. I mean, the Valve FMV goes, "doooo______oooo, dooo_____oooo, doom ba_____kadoom ba_____kadoom _____bakado_____om." In other games with FMV, such as Oblivion's Patrick Stewart New Game intro, yields the same kind of "I am tal_____king in an_____ FMV" stutter symptom. Let me be clear: all of the audio plays. These gaps are inserted. It's not like Dee Dee from Dexter's Lab is screwing with my mute button.
That's not all. In Team Fortress 2, something is... off. It's not quite right. The rendering and audio is not quite in synch. I now have a noticable gap between the spin-up sound effect and the "maintain spinning" sound effect on Heavy. And the taunts for the Scout have something wrong with their timing. It's like time is stretched for the audio, or something, and it just keeps dumping this one-second buffer like its short of breath.
Finally, I notice a problem when doing the "test render" thing in Adobe Premier when you hit Enter to process what you have so far so you can preview it smoothly. It's like it's running at the wrong framerate. It's like it's hitching and the video is constantly jumping ahead to keep up with the audio or something.
There are no other obvious symptoms. I can't quantify an increase in Windows startup time, normal movies (AVIs, MOVs, even oddball codec stuff) run fine and synched, etc.
Reinstalling Creative Audigy drivers doesn't fix. Reinstalling Steam doesn't fix. ATI Driver update, nope. Reformatting Windows... well, yeah, until mystery event happens again. The past few times it happened, I can't remember what I did before it started doing it. *This* time, today, happened after I started to screw with WindowBlinds XP skinner and some other desktop gadgets. Which one stung me? I don't know. I uninstalled WindowBlinds and it didn't help. I tried System Restore and went back a few days ago. No. So once whatever breaks is broken, it's not easily fixed.Â
It's like a land mine. I step on it and I have a reformat in front of me because the symptoms DRIVE ME CRAZY. I find them absolutely intolerable.
Anyway, does anyone else around here experience this sometimes? If not, don't worry about it.Â
brb uninstalling.Â
FUCK. >
I do a clean install of WinXP. Great. All patches, latest ATI drivers, mmm-hmm, good. Defrag, all the stuff you do after a reformat. Yeah, got it.
Install Steam. Get TF2 installed. Launch it. Okay, now, the Valve "dooooooo, dooooooooo, doom bakadoom bakadoom bakadoom" FMV with the faucet-guy. You know what I'm talking about? Okay, that plays *fine*. I'm talking about intro movies, FMVs, whatever you want to call them. They play smoothly, they play correctly, woo-hoo. Any game. Oblivion, yes. Note I'm still talking about "FMVs".
Now, at some point, I'm going to do something, and that causes something else to break.
Issue: FMVs begin to have an intermittent but very regular stutter in the audio. No, not the video. The audio. The stutter is like a square wave with a low frequency. I mean, the Valve FMV goes, "doooo______oooo, dooo_____oooo, doom ba_____kadoom ba_____kadoom _____bakado_____om." In other games with FMV, such as Oblivion's Patrick Stewart New Game intro, yields the same kind of "I am tal_____king in an_____ FMV" stutter symptom. Let me be clear: all of the audio plays. These gaps are inserted. It's not like Dee Dee from Dexter's Lab is screwing with my mute button.
That's not all. In Team Fortress 2, something is... off. It's not quite right. The rendering and audio is not quite in synch. I now have a noticable gap between the spin-up sound effect and the "maintain spinning" sound effect on Heavy. And the taunts for the Scout have something wrong with their timing. It's like time is stretched for the audio, or something, and it just keeps dumping this one-second buffer like its short of breath.
Finally, I notice a problem when doing the "test render" thing in Adobe Premier when you hit Enter to process what you have so far so you can preview it smoothly. It's like it's running at the wrong framerate. It's like it's hitching and the video is constantly jumping ahead to keep up with the audio or something.
There are no other obvious symptoms. I can't quantify an increase in Windows startup time, normal movies (AVIs, MOVs, even oddball codec stuff) run fine and synched, etc.
Reinstalling Creative Audigy drivers doesn't fix. Reinstalling Steam doesn't fix. ATI Driver update, nope. Reformatting Windows... well, yeah, until mystery event happens again. The past few times it happened, I can't remember what I did before it started doing it. *This* time, today, happened after I started to screw with WindowBlinds XP skinner and some other desktop gadgets. Which one stung me? I don't know. I uninstalled WindowBlinds and it didn't help. I tried System Restore and went back a few days ago. No. So once whatever breaks is broken, it's not easily fixed.Â
It's like a land mine. I step on it and I have a reformat in front of me because the symptoms DRIVE ME CRAZY. I find them absolutely intolerable.
Anyway, does anyone else around here experience this sometimes? If not, don't worry about it.Â
brb uninstalling.Â
FUCK. >