Weird PC Problem

[oldengineer]

I have an HP desktop with a fast AMD quad core processor, 8GB memory and a Radeon 5200 series graphics card. I'm trying to edit a wedding video that's about 16GB total and consists of about 135 clips in m2st (Sony) format. I'm using Cyberlink Power Director V8. I can import the video OK but when I attempt to render it into MP4 format things go south. This has happened three times exactly like this:
1. Rendering starts and runs OK for about 3 minutes. Then the screen goes wacko, shows a myriad of random colors, and the whole machine freezes. There's no disk activity, no response to mouse or keyboard, nothing.
2. I shut the machine off holding the power button down. Now the fun starts. If I try to restart the machine I get one of 3 responses -
a. the welcome screen with the F options will appear but that's as far as it will go. No further action
b. the fan will start up in high speed but no disk access will occur - the monitor won't even activate
c. almost like b. except there's a few seconds of disk activity but no other action.

Now if I let the machine cool off for 10 or 15 minutes it will go thru the bad last shutdown process. I boot into safe mode and then restart and everything is fine. Running chkdsk shows no errors.

I've never seen anything like this and my best guess is that the processor is getting overheated. Has anyone else had anything like this happen?

 

[StevenD]

double-check your heatsink or CPU fan. If the machine is a few years old, its possible the thermal paste has broken down.

 

[kittyhas1000legs]

Yeah, might be a heat issue. Install Speedfan or Speccy to see how hot it's getting. 60C is pretty hot, and some PCs automatically shut down around 74-80C to keep from damaging themselves.

This may sound a bit odd, but remove the side panel from the tower and then turn it on. If the fan on the back of the tower is dead, replace it. If the fan on the cpu is dead, immediately replace it (after finding one that fits your board, determined by the kind of cpu). Hopefully it just needs a good blast with compressed air to clean off dust/pet hair.

 

[mike123abc]

It could also be the fan on the graphics card, the software could be using the graphics hardware for the MPEG encoding.

 

[kittyhas1000legs]

It could also be the fan on the graphics card, the software could be using the graphics hardware for the MPEG encoding.

I'd forgotten about that. That may explain the "myriad of random colors" and the fact that it can be shut down with the power button rather than automatically shutting down.

For reference, here's what Speccy looks like (though it doesn't recognize the 2TB drive):

 

[harshness]

It could also be the fan on the graphics card, the software could be using the graphics hardware for the MPEG encoding.

Most display cards don't feature MPEG encoding. They may have hardware that helps accelerate it but they're built with an eye on decoding as opposed to encoding.

If you've noticed that the transcoding software supports powerful graphics cards, it is mostly so they can use the decoding capability of the display card to get to the uncompressed video -- half of the battle.

 

[mike123abc]

From Cyberlink's web site:

Multi-GPGPU & Hardware Acceleration
Optimized for latest hardware
PowerDirector 12 is optimized for the latest generation hardware from Intel® Core Technology, AMD ® APU and nVidia ® GPU technology. Multi-GPGPU support allows you to maximize performance from both onboard GPU and external graphics card.

Since it can use multi gpus it implies that it does hardware accelerated encoding using the GPU. You might try to see if there is an updated video driver.

Nvidia's page on GPU MPEG encoding: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

 

[oldengineer]

Thanks for the replies. I took the case off, cleaned it out and ran PowerDirector again. All 3 fans were running fine. This time I stopped the rendering after 2 minutes and again the machine froze totally but the screen retained the last good image. No mouse or keyboard response, had to shut down with the power button. Again the machine refused to boot and ended up with fans running but no monitor, disk or keyboard response. After about 10 attempts it again got to the bad last shutdown screen and it started OK. I can't understand why it acts like that but I'm now convinced that it's associated with PowerDirector and not overheating. If I use the power key to shut down without PowerDirector running it powers back up fine. Can PwrDirector be doing something to the memory or graphics so the machine is hanging in POST? When the machine hangs the monitor and wireless usb receiver don't activate so I don't have any visual indication of what's happening.

 

[harshness]

From Cyberlink's web site:

The Cyberlink references are for very special hardware combinations to improve editing, rendering and effects. The big boost for encoding comes from the hardware encoding featured in the Sandy Bridge processors.

Nvidia's page on GPU MPEG encoding: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

Note that the cards mentioned are all ridiculously priced OpenGL CAD cards that have substantially fallen from favor since Autodesk transitioned to DIRECTX.

 

[oldengineer]

Well it looks like keeping drivers updated is a good idea after all. When I first got this machine AMD was providing a Catalyst package for their Radeon cards which included display and graphics drivers and a bunch of other stuff for optimizing the display and games, etc. The problem was that when I installed it the video driver kept resizing my screen so I uninstalled it and just kept the graphics and video drivers and never updated them. I took y'alls advice and downloaded the latest Catalyst and the graphics driver went from 7.x to 14.x. They apparently fixed the resizing problem because the display is OK AND the rendering has been running for over 45 minutes and it's 50% complete. Cyberlink recommends disabling hardware acceleration if there are problems but it looks like things are running OK now.

I'm going to let it finish for drill but I've got a lot of editing to do. This video was done by my brother and as the night progressed and his wine consumption grew it got a little shaky. There's a segment where he put the camera down to eat and I've got 7 minutes looking at the bottom of a table vase and another one where he's yelling at his wife to get him more red wine. He also did a long clip of the bride's sister who looks just like her except that the bride was wearing a traditional white gown and the sister was wearing a short blue strapless dress.

Hopefully all's well that ends well.

 

[mike123abc]

Well a driver update is much easier than a machine update, glad to see it fixed!

 

[oldengineer]

Bottom line, the rendering finished OK and produced a 900MB MP4 from the original 16GB video. I'll start editing today.

I'm still a little dismayed to find out that an application or hardware, PowerDirector, the Radeon 5450 card, or both could get the machine into a state where it would not boot up even to the start screen after shutdown. It took about 15-20 start attempts to finally get it past POST and getting to the start screen after the first 3 unsuccessful editing sessions. The only reason I didn't use my rescue disks after the first failure was that I couldn't find them so I kept trying to start it until I finally had success.