The mess that K-Lite caused was the sheer number of codecs it installed. If something goes wrong and you can't play something, it's madness to try to figure out what's not playing correctly.

Perhaps the reason you can't get VLC to play nicely is that you have all those codecs on there? All I know is that I've had zero problems with it, and in my experience the more you bother with codecs, the worse things get. I made the decision a few years ago to never install any codecs other than Divx, and since then I used mplayer until I switched to VLC because it had a GUI and could play DVDs (speaking of quasi-legal).

Quote:
The only thing I can think of that you might be talking about is the installation of Media Player Classic

You need to install MPC? It's always been a standalone file when I've used it, and it always works quite well. And I've never installed Real or QT alternatives. Why? because VLC plays them.

Try my method sometime. When I reformat my system, my installation order is always the same:

Firefox
AVG
VLC/Divx

After that I don't need to install a single other thing to play 99% of the files I've come across.

Quote:
it can help you see what codecs are on your system and how the system is trying to use them.

Neat! I wasn't aware it could do that. Thanks for the tip!

I guess you have to install a dBpoweramp WMA plugin.

Interesting. I thought I had a solution when I noticed that there was a Mac version of mpeg streamclip. Okay, the mac is slow, but at least there's a batch encode option in mpeg streamclip so it can run overnight.

Not so fast. These files crash the mac, too. But at least the mac gives a crashdump. I don't suppose the crashdump data is decipherable by any of youse guys is it? (attached)

Yeah, sorta.

Quote:
EXC_BAD_ACCESS/KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE — This is caused by the thread trying to write to read-only memory. This is always caused by a data access.

What it's saying is that the program is trying to write to data outside its realm. This is usually a bug in the program. And it did crash inside the DivX codec.

My guess is that there's something funky in the clip and there's a bug in both the Windows and Mac codecs that it tweaks. The obvious solution would be to install a different codec to deal with it. Maybe get someone who was able to convert it properly to tell you what DivX codec they have installed and then install that one.

I'm afraid I don't have any real codec knowledge within MacOS, but I bet you're running the official DivX codec on both the Mac and the Windows machine, and they probably are 99% the same code with the same bug.

Dump the official Divx plugin on the mac and try Perian. That and the Flip4Mac codecs are the only ones my mac has, and it encoded your file fine to an MP4 H.264 file.

Okay, simply running deinstall on the Divx items on the PC seemed to work, didn't even need a reboot. Both the Windows control panel and GSpot no longer report any Divx codecs.

Try MPEG Streamclip on the PC again, same exact crash as detailed at the top of the thread.

Of course the whole "it crashes in the Divx codec" thing was only diagnosed on the Mac, I was just hoping that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. I'm going to try removing Divx from the mac (not sure how but I'll poke at it) and see if I get the same result.

/Library/Quicktime and ~/Library/Quicktime contain any external video codecs on the Mac. Nuke DivX there and it will be gone, then install Perian (linked above) to still be able to play them.

*edit* looking at your crashdump, DivX installed a framework too, nuke it from /Library/Frameworks/DivX Toolkit.framework.

I had already found everything except the framework dealie and started another attempt at encoding. The first pass of the encode was at 49% when I read this message and deleted the framework dealie. Wonder if it will complain when it reaches the second pass, or if it will just work?

Thanks for all your help, everyone. I don't have a solution yet, but all the great help and advice in this thread gives me a warm fuzzy.

This is very frustrating, there's about a dozen other things I want to get to, but I keep getting tripped up on this and must spend every free moment trying to get last weekend's con movies properly encoded. I'd rather be working on music, or testing Nong's beta toy, or doing other updates to my web site... but until I get a proper solution for encoding movies for my web site, I just can't move forward with anything. Argh.

Keep in mind deleting the framework while the encoder was open and active doesn't unload it from memory, it just deletes it off the disk. The encoder will still be using it if it loaded it when you started the program.

Well, in any case, it seemed to work. I left a batch encode of several files running overnight on the Mac and in the morning it was done, no crashes.

So, on the mac, the solution is: Delete all Divx. Thanks for the help, and the tip about that one set of files that I hadn't seen before.

I'd still eventually like to find a PC solution, since the PC can do these encodes about four times as fast (when it doesn't crash).

Unfortunately, when the PC crashes, it crashes HARD, with the system simply going BLINK straight into full-power-off mode. One millisecond it's working, the next, bam, no power. No blue screen, no crash message, no log file. So I'm not sure how to go about finding the source of the crash.

For all I know, it could still be some leftover remnant of Divx on the PC that I'm not seeing, but I wouldn't know where to look other than Gspot and the Windows control panel codecs list.

Final answer:

Intermittently bad RAM. Only shows up after Memtest86 has had a chance to run several passes.

Funny how the Mac and PC both crashed, but for completely different reasons.

Only one of two RAM modules is bad. Corsair, lifetime warranty in theory, but I can't find the receipt. I have the original packaging and I know where I bought it. Wonder if that's enough.