Windows 7 Sound "bubble" in MCE and Media Player

JohnGom

New Member
I recently upgraded to Windows 7 to get the Media Centre for recording TV. I used to use MediaPortal on Windows XP but the scheduled recording was unreliable.

The recording in MCE is great but when I watch back the sound soon starts to degrade and become what I can only describe as "bubbly", i.e. sounds like the speakers are under water. The effect seems to get worse the longer the video is running - it might start off OK but become unbearable after 5 minutes.

I've checked for the latest video and sound drivers and they are all current. I am able to watch old recordings on VLC fine, but the same .ts file on Media Player does the "bubble effect".

Apart from this system performance is just as good, if not better, than when XP was installed. I've also increased the memory from 1 to 2GB but that didn't make any difference.

I'm using Windows 7 32 bit with AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor, ECS motherboard with NFORCE-A939 chipset and GeForce 6600 graphics.

Any tips as to what I should be looking out for?
 
Hello and welcome to the windows7 forums.

An upgrade is the worst route to take.

A "clean" install is the way to go.

I'd suggest another hard drive if you really want XP. The leftover files form XP are probably causing the conflict.

Did you get the GeForce 6600 directly from Nvidia's site?

What is the exact make and model of your sound card?

Do you have SPDIF output or just the standard jacks?
 
It was a completely clean install - re-formatted hard-disk with a full Windows 7 version (not upgrade).

Full details of video card: Leadtek WinFast GeForce 6600 256MB DDR2 PCI-E TV + DVI
 
Again........

Did you get the GeForce 6600 directly from Nvidia's site?

Could you provide us with a screen shot?
 
Any chance another codec was installed? You can find out which codecs are installed by opening Windows Media Player and help and About Media Player and Technical info at the bottom. Maybe you could post a snipping tool picture of your codecs.

This information is in help and support if you search for codecs.
 
Not sure I understand question from reghakr, I assume you are asking about the drivers, which I did download directly from Nvidia.

Current codec information from MP attached
 
Going out on a limb here, but try installing the K-Lite Codec Pack and select Windows Media Player as the default.

Download K-Lite Codec Pack 5.40 (Full) - FileHippo.com

Can't hurt and they're always useful for audio and video playback.

Also, go to Control Panel > Device Manager and look for any entries with a yellow flag.

No go to Start > Run, and type services.msc, scroll down to the Windows Media Center entries and make sure all are started.

Also, do you have the latest version of VLC.....1.03?
 
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I see some differences, although I do not know if it would cause your problem.

For some reason, the Binary and Version information of the first 6 audio codecs is missing. Did you not copy it or is it really missing.

Under the Video Codecs, I show below Cinepak Codec a vfwwdm32.dll, which appears to be part of Win 7, but I may have something on my system that needs it.
 
All the Codecs you posted are built into Windows 7, but you may need another to properly play the video.

Don't worry about the binary or version, sometimes they are not displayed

Could you please answer my other questions
 
Apologies for the delayed response, didn't get an email notification for some reason.

I tried installing the K-Lite codec pack. Wasn't sure which Codecs to install so got it to install just about everything.

Media Player Classic seems to be playing OK, but I'll need to bed it in for a while to be sure as the problem often doesn't occur until after the video has been running for a while.

Also, I'd like the be able to use Media Centre ideally (that's the main reson I bought Windows 7) but I'm not sure how to get it to use the alternative Codecs. I tried using the DirectShow Filter Tweaker to change all the defaults to not be Microsoft, but I don't know how to find out what codec is used by the WTV files that MCE generates as it doesn't show in the properties or MediaInfo tool.

I'll try running with things for a while and give an update on how it's going, unless anyone has any bright ideas in the meantime.

Thanks for all your help so far.
 
Sorry, I don't understand the question about Media Player appearing in Media Centre.

An update having used the system for a while since installing the new Codecs...

Media Player Classic seems to run pretty well, as does MediaPortal, but MCE and Microsoft Media Player are still having problems with the WTV files that MCE creates for recorded television programs. In noticed on the K-Lite site that MCE and WMP don't use DirectShow any more for certain formats so I guess the K-Lite Codecs aren't able to be substituted.
 
At the moment I'm using MediaPortal as that saves .ts files which I am now able to play OK thanks to the K-Lite Codecs. However, I want to use MCE which records in the WTV format, but that is still giving me poor quality sound at the moment
 
I downloaded the NVIDIA System Monitor as I was getting paranoid that maybe there was a hardware problem and perhaps something was overheating (as the problem tends to get worse the longer I watch). However, when viewing video in MCE or MPC the GPU usage sits at 0%

Shouldn't the GPU be taking some of the load when watching video?
 
Not sure if anyone is still watching this thread, but anyway...

I have had to revert back to Windwos XP for now as we use the PC as a video recorder and we just couldn't watch what we had recorded in Windows 7. However, I did find out a couple of things:

With XP installed when watching video my processor utilisation runs at about 20% and the system clock speed remains at maximum. However, when I was running Windows 7 I noticed that the processor utilisation was much higher (80-90%) and that the clock speed was varying all the time.

Is there some feature of Windows 7 that automatically varies the clock speed (maybe to save power) which could be causing the problem?
 
I guess nobody's following this thread any more, but here's a bit more information...

I did some experiments with Windows 7 and Resource Monitor and found that it is the "System Interrupts" process that seems to be causing the problem. With the videos that are affected the %age utilisation of this process gradually rises and eventually causes the sound quality to deteriorate.

What's really odd is that some videos don't have this problem and the process stays stable at around 15%. I can't figure out what's different between the videos that are OK and the ones that have a problem, but I'll log an update if I finally get anywhere with Microsoft Support
 
I tried more RAM when I first got the problem, moving up from 1 GB to 2, but it didn't make any difference. Plus the memory is nowhere near being fully utilised.
 
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