FLASKing with TBird 1333

[sasa]

I am having major problems with FLASK and my new Athlon. Before I had celery 566*850. It never crashed and it flasked with about 5 fps (flask version 0.6, 640*480, deinterlace, divx4.0 1500 rate, sound PCM decoder). Few days ago I bought A1333, MSI k7t lite (bios v2.9), strong thermaltake volcano 6 cu+ cooler(bloody noisy), maxtor hdd, afreey dvd, G400, new case with 300w power supply, 384 Mb pc133 RAM, winXP final. Temp after full load never exceeds 55-57 degrees (bios reading).
For such speedy Athlon my result with same setting in flask of about 7 fps is too low. If I change from default mmx IDCT to Athlon optimised score is even lower. Another, bigger problem is crashing. I can not flask single vob file because it always crash.
It always start ok, but after a while it crash so hard that winXP get blue screen saying I have to restart... (never seen before with o.c. celery). Games, various benchmarks, all is ok, speed as expected, no crashes.
I tried various setting in bios, no change at all.
Just checked forum www.flaskmpeg.net, found nothing.
Should I upgrade to divx4.01? I dont think thats the answer, but I will do it. Any other Idea? I am pretty desperate. I bought Athlon for flasking DVD...

[Flying dutchman]

My prime suspect would be the power supply. Number two the memory chips.

Checkout www.simmtester.com - their freeware program correctly identified one of my Dimms as faulty. Let the program run an intensive test for a couple of hours- temperature has a negative impact on stability.


Are you using the latest Via 4-in-1 drivers, and good udma-100 cabling?

[Sciascia]

There are numerous versions of Flask out there, I do not keep up with it, but there may be a bug in it. I would check the forums at www.doom9.org they have a Flask forum there. I would suggest using the guides and going a diffeent route anyway. Flask is allright for ease, but if you want really good DivX, I would suggest using NanDub or one of the other methods listed in Doom9's guides.

I had troubles with Flask 6 crashing with my PIII and decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and the quality was subpar.

[sasa]

I bought new case because old one was lousy and had 230w power supply. I bought it for about 45 US dollars. In the store they had better cases priced around 90 dollars, but I thought this one would do fine. I hope it will work ok. I will try that RAM tester, thanx. I have XP, I was told there is no need for installing new via drivers since XP already have what is needed. Regarding power supplay, how can I test it? Should I connect old one for DVD, HDD, SB128 and let new one running only Athlon? I dont think that would do anything since new one should be enough strong to run my comp since I dont have so many things in it.
I will go to www.doom9.org and try something else. Thanks for help.

[Indiana]

You should definitely try different versions / compiles of flask (unfortunately there are too many of them out there). I once had a version as well that kept crashing like hell, but the one I currently have, there are no problems (Athlon 1333 here as well). And it does about 12-17 fps on movies with DivX 4.01 (video) and mp3 (audio) encoding.

You 're not overclocking by any chance? My Athlon seems to run stable at high FSBs (160MHz) in everything (Office, Photoshop, Q-III, 3DMark2k1, ...), but running Flask at this speed brings a crash sooner or later. So try to lower your FSB just a notch or use a bit more conservative memory timings when oc'ing.

And NEVER use the 3DNow IDCTs as they're giving worse quality. The best speed- and qualitywise is "Miha's x87 fast IDCT".

[sasa]

I did not overclock nothing. Yesterday I tried another power supply taken from macase. It is only 250w but I unpluged everything except HDD and motherboard. As far as I know macase is one of the best. I even unplugged RAM leaving one 256 MB Infineon PC133, 2 week old. I tried flasking, and soon comp made hard reset. (not blue screen, real reset). After that I ran cpu stability test for 45 minutes. It worked ok, flask never worked for 45 minutes. Today I will try another version of flask. I saw somewhere that divx4 and XP does not work well?

[sasa]

Problem regarding crashing solved. It was not hardware relate - its winXP and divx4. When I install divx3.11 suddenly there was no instability problems. But one problem is still present - speed. I downloaded everything I found - miha optimised version, amd version... But I can not get FPS above 8 average. Sure, if I put resolution down and turn off deinterlacing I got better FPS, but I seek for quality. I will repeat myself: with same setting on celery 850 I got around 5, now "optimised" AMD version I got in best case scenario 8? And if I use AMD optimised version score is even worse. The fastest is mmx version. Am I stupid or what? WinXP was clean installed. HELP!

[dsp]

Sasa,

Just a question: Do you Flask off the DVD or the Hard Drive. I've noticed that my DVD drive seems to not want to let DivX go very fast when encoding straight from a DVD, but when on the hard drive its faster.

Just a thought.

dsp

[sasa]

I flasked from HDD. Now I will probably pause flasking till some new Divx codec is released... I certanly wont go back to w98... I like XP.