Intermittent FMV audio (?)

[Fail Medic]

Wall of sob-story text follows.  tl;dr.  I'm posting this here on the off-chance that someone knows what I'm talking about.  I've looked online, I've tried, but no one ever seems to be describing or experienced these specific symptoms.

I do a clean install of WinXP.  Great.  All patches, latest ATI drivers, mmm-hmm, good.  Defrag, all the stuff you do after a reformat.  Yeah, got it.

Install Steam.  Get TF2 installed.  Launch it.  Okay, now, the Valve "dooooooo, dooooooooo, doom bakadoom bakadoom bakadoom" FMV with the faucet-guy.  You know what I'm talking about?  Okay, that plays *fine*.  I'm talking about intro movies, FMVs, whatever you want to call them.  They play smoothly, they play correctly, woo-hoo.  Any game.  Oblivion, yes.  Note I'm still talking about "FMVs".

Now, at some point, I'm going to do something, and that causes something else to break.

Issue: FMVs begin to have an intermittent but very regular stutter in the audio.  No, not the video.  The audio.  The stutter is like a square wave with a low frequency.  I mean, the Valve FMV goes, "doooo______oooo, dooo_____oooo, doom ba_____kadoom ba_____kadoom _____bakado_____om."  In other games with FMV, such as Oblivion's Patrick Stewart New Game intro, yields the same kind of "I am tal_____king in an_____ FMV" stutter symptom.  Let me be clear: all of the audio plays.  These gaps are inserted.  It's not like Dee Dee from Dexter's Lab is screwing with my mute button.

That's not all.  In Team Fortress 2, something is... off.  It's not quite right.  The rendering and audio is not quite in synch.  I now have a noticable gap between the spin-up sound effect and the "maintain spinning" sound effect on Heavy.  And the taunts for the Scout have something wrong with their timing.  It's like time is stretched for the audio, or something, and it just keeps dumping this one-second buffer like its short of breath.

Finally, I notice a problem when doing the "test render" thing in Adobe Premier when you hit Enter to process what you have so far so you can preview it smoothly.  It's like it's running at the wrong framerate.  It's like it's hitching and the video is constantly jumping ahead to keep up with the audio or something.

There are no other obvious symptoms.  I can't quantify an increase in Windows startup time, normal movies (AVIs, MOVs, even oddball codec stuff) run fine and synched, etc.

Reinstalling Creative Audigy drivers doesn't fix.  Reinstalling Steam doesn't fix.  ATI Driver update, nope.  Reformatting Windows... well, yeah, until mystery event happens again.  The past few times it happened, I can't remember what I did before it started doing it.  *This* time, today, happened after I started to screw with WindowBlinds XP skinner and some other desktop gadgets.  Which one stung me?  I don't know.  I uninstalled WindowBlinds and it didn't help.  I tried System Restore and went back a few days ago.  No.  So once whatever breaks is broken, it's not easily fixed. 

It's like a land mine.  I step on it and I have a reformat in front of me because the symptoms DRIVE ME CRAZY.  I find them absolutely intolerable.

Anyway, does anyone else around here experience this sometimes?  If not, don't worry about it. 

brb uninstalling. 

FUCK.  >

[Mission Difficult]

Never had this problem. This only happens in games and premier? What kind of audigy card do you have? Do you have another card you can test with?

[Fail Medic]

Never had this problem. This only happens in games and premier? What kind of audigy card do you have? Do you have another card you can test with?

Yeah, pretty much in games and movie editing, but not in watching DVDs or other stuff like saved AVIs.  I have an Audigy 2 ZS, and no, I've no other audio card to test.

[Vandamguy]

i have a similar problem with audio in steam when im playing on XP. i think its different from your problem , but.

it might be a multi or dual core problem , try setting yoru programs to use one core instead of both

right click taskbar > task manager > right click on "application.exe" > properties > set affinity > core 0 >

leme know if that floats your boat

[ScottyGrayskull]

If it's only within games I'd say it's either something with your video drivers, or something with DirectX/Direct3D. Seeing as it's ATI drivers, that might be the culprit.

Back several months ago when I got my latest video card I couldn't use the two or three latest versions of ATI's drivers. Anything using Direct3D (aka: just about any remotely recent game) would just stop running and quit to the desktop. I had to install drivers that were I think four versions old before it worked, although the newest drivers thankfully seem to have fixed that problem. Not the same problem you have, but with the state of ATI's crappy drivers I wouldn't be surprised if that is it.

So... as annoying as it might sound I'd almost suggest trying older versions of the ATI drivers.

[ainmosni]

If it's only within games I'd say it's either something with your video drivers, or something with DirectX/Direct3D. Seeing as it's ATI drivers, that might be the culprit.

Back several months ago when I got my latest video card I couldn't use the two or three latest versions of ATI's drivers. Anything using Direct3D (aka: just about any remotely recent game) would just stop running and quit to the desktop. I had to install drivers that were I think four versions old before it worked, although the newest drivers thankfully seem to have fixed that problem. Not the same problem you have, but with the state of ATI's crappy drivers I wouldn't be surprised if that is it.

So... as annoying as it might sound I'd almost suggest trying older versions of the ATI drivers.

QFT, ATI's drivers suck... They seem to subscribe to the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters school of writing drivers and don't even get me started on their linux drivers... ATI's drivers drove me to using nvidia exclusivly...

[ToiletDuck]

have you tried switching to the onboard sound on your mobo?

from there you can determine if it's your soundcard (driver issue) or not

[copulatingduck]

How attached are you to your sound card? I would say do what TD suggested, but if that doesn't work, try a reinstall without the sound card. See if it doesn't pop up then. Also, try reading the Windows updates more carefully. Sometimes they break things more than they fix them. There's one I'm thinking of that I absolutely CANNOT install, or it completely disables my ethernet device. Mayhaps there is one that is breaking audio/sound devices?

[Fail Medic]

I thank y'all for the replies.

Vandamguy:  I did try to set affinity to one processor.  Loaded TF2, saw it stuttering during Valve fmv, so I set affinity and then I played one of the stock map intro movies... and there's stuttering.  Damn. 

Scotty, Ainmosni:  I've been having this problem through several iterations of ATI drivers, so rolling back to an older one doesn't seem like it would help.  Granted, I've been ATI ATI ATI for really no reason other than inertia, so next card I get I may give NVIDIA a shot.  However, this ATI card is brand new and had a heavy sticker.  Yes, the issue was happening while the older ATI card was installed, so I'm hesitant to fault the new one.  I can't get past the whole "I'll give you a few weeks then pull this shit" thing.

T' & C'Duck:  I don't have onboard sound at all, so that's not an option.  However, I can't say I'm very attached to this sound card.  It's still stock from when I got this thing, and it has irritated me with unrelated issues several times in the past.  As far as Windows Updates go, I do have XP Service Pack 3 install file.  After I reinstall, I was going to use that rather than get the 100+ updates the regular way. 

Anyway, if anything interesting develops, I'll let y'all know.  Thanks again.

[Dave]

change it to:
"Sorry, had to poop it, I was about to die."

[hawtpawkithero]

reformat.

lol.

[Fail Medic]

reformat.

lol.

omfg wut do u thikn im doin rite now

[me=Fail]looks over at main[/me]

lol sp3 install