wmv freezes and locks up the laptop

  • Thread starter Thread starter Charlie7805
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Charlie7805

In helping a co-worker with a presentation I made a few wmvs. One keeps
freezing and locks up his laptop. It runs fine on my laptop. Our laptops
(company) are all the same, Dell D610's. RAM and video settings identical.

The ppt size is less than 75megs.

Any ideas?
 
Try this,

Go to Control Panel/Settings/Advanced/Troubleshoot/Hardware
Accelerator.

Move the accelerator to the middle or even on slot to the left of
that.

Insert video again. Should work.

jack
 
I captured a 1min 12 sec recording from a DVD movie running through my TV
tuner. Then in avi format, I used Boilsoft to convert to wmv. I put that
wmv file into movie maker to add special effects and transitions. Then save
that as a movie file.

I have done this many times over the past 3 years and works great.
 
we're having the same issue with certain WMVs in powerpoint.... when you get
to playing the WMV file within powerpoint it just sits on a black screen and
freezes powerpoint (powerpoint 2003 w/ the latest SP). on Dell latitude D620
and D630s.

I wonder if there's a driver bug?

i hate the idea of slowing down video playback to fix this, seems like a
step backwards!

-D
 
Hmmm, I don't quite understand why Boilsoft is needed. Movie Maker will
work with the AVI file and eliminate one of the encoding steps. (Each time
you re-encode you lose quality.)


Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team

Provider of PFCPro, PFCMedia and PFCExpress
www.playsforcertain.com
 
by the way, i should mention that the latitude D630s we have use the Mobile
Intel 965 Express Chipset Family drivers....

On Dell's site, the newest drivers they have are from 5/2007... (driver
version 6.14.10.4831 is what we have installed). On Intel's site, however,
there are driver files from 12/2007, which seems to be several revisions
newer. Looking at the revision notes there are some revision changes
relating to video playback.

When I try to download and install the Intel drivers, I get an error stating
the drivers aren't verified for that hardware (despite it being the same
hardware and an Intel chipset) and I need to contact my manufacturer... I
wonder if Dell has anything newer available if you call...hmm

.... this particular WMV video is a WMV HD video that was reencoded from
Quicktime HD. It has to be WMV instead of Quicktime since Quicktime can't
easily be embedded into powerpoint. I'm told that they tried various MPEG
codecs and nothing came close in quality.

The hardware acceleration solution does indeed fix this, but that of course
makes all videos slower in playback. I can notice frames dropping, for
intsance... so that seems pointless to me.

-d
 
After spending several hours on the phone with Dell we have finally made some
progress on this issue. In a nut shell, it looks like Dell got caught in
their own mess. They apparently make some adjustment to the embedded video
card so that the Intel driver won't install. The Dell driver has a flaw that
causes a lock up when playing a video in powerpoint unless hardware
acceleration is turned off. After going through about 8 levels of Dell
support, they are going to have their web development team get in touch with
Intel to get a revised driver that fixes the problem - they are hoping for a
24 hour turn around.
 
thanks... we eventually just re-encoded the videos into another format...

though after having this issue, we started to have a lot of problems with
Quicktime movies (HD and non HD encodings)... videos were freezing on these
laptops when not freezing on other laptops. as it turns out, the latest
quicktime release causes that not to happen...

i'm guessing it's some sort of similar bug in their driver, but luckily the
latest quicktime either works around it or resolves it.. so i would highly
recommend making sure your quicktime is up to date.

good to h ear a fix is on the way though!
 
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