I’m usually the one answering computer threads rather than asking them, but this one’s got me stumped.
An “incident” while installing Vista caused me to have to re-install my XP system. This is on an AMD-64 machine that had XP on it before. The new install is reasonably clean, it has just Windows, Office, a development system, and a few random apps on it. It’s fully patched XP SP2.
The problem? Video files play choppily, and at about twice (maybe a little more) of normal speed. It appears to be all video files: .wmv, .avi, .mov, .asf, and for all players (Windows Media Player 10, DivX player 6.4, Apple’s QuickTime Player). They’re universally twice or more the speed they should be. The video files are a mix of downloaded clips, commercial stuff, and things I encoded myself. I didn’t have this problem in my previous XP install on the same system. Codecs are limited to the baseline ones plus whatever DivX and QuickTime install. Depending on the video format, the sound either plays super-fast as well, or plays at normal speed (and thus gets unsynced from the audio).
Nothing else on the system seems odd. Two different virus scanners say I’m clean. Any ideas?
Have you installed all the latest drivers available from either the hardware manufacturer or the PC / motherboard maker?
I once had a problem with a nearly stock Dell with audio playing 33% or so faster than it should. It turns out that they were running a faster clock signal than the audio card was expecting, thus the ‘standard’ drivers for my SoundMax card (and later the most up-to-date versions that I got from the audio card manufacturer) didn’t work and I had to use the Dell provided version.
Yep, all the drivers are installed, and up to date. It’s an nVidia-based video card and a Sound-Blaster card anyway, so it’s not like they’re exotic. They’re the same drivers I was using before, too, so I have extra confirmation that it’s not them.
What’s weird is that it’s universal. The only think I haven’t found to play at double speed is STREAMED iTunes music. Local files play at double speed, though.
I’m not willing to sacrifice another weekend to an XP reinstall (and after the Vista incident, I must be almost out of XP activations, anyway.) Any other ideas? On the assumption that some basic codec is screwed up, anyone know how I can dump 'em and force Windows to go get 'em again?