I've been working with KVCD for over a year now. Any problems I've encountered have been quickly remedied by simply searching this board.

Now, however, I'm having difficulties that the suggestions here cannot fix:

1) Movies will encode to one third of the way through and stop. I get varying errors in TMPGEnc for this (P3Package.dll errors being the most common).

2) If a movie does seem to complete, when I check the video at some point the film stops and I have a black screen with red letters telling me that Avisynth caught an access violation.

3) HeadAC3he will now close down during an operation, leaving an unuseable 2 GB .mp2 file.

I've tried everything I could find relating to these problems. Nothing works.

This started happening after I installed a new harddrive and replaced my SDRAM memory with DDR. I also reinstalled XP, but I'm using the exact same codecs and programs (right down to the version numbers) that I was using before.

My question is this: Could these problems be caused by a faulty memory stick?

I appreciate any insight. Thanks.

Hi James Alan,

Are you overclocking your CPU

-kwag

Hell, Kwag...Thanks for replying.

No, I'm not overclocking. I have an AMD Athlon XP 2400 and it runs fast enough for me that I haven't even considered overclocking it. (And I've always been afraid of even attempting something like that.)

Everything encoded just fine until I installed the new harddrive and memory. Those are the only changes I've made.

I'm going insane trying to figure this out.

There's a program, I recall suggested by sh0dan, I think it's called "Prime95" which is used to do heavy testing on the machine.
See if you can find it, and run it to see what it reports.
Search on google for that name.

-kwag

I just tried Prime95. Thanks for the suggestion, Kwag.

I installed and ran the program. It closed down by itself within two minutes of testing. I restarted and tried to test again. I get this:

ERROR: ILLEGAL SUMOUT
Possible hardware failure

This may very well be the same problem causing my encodes to mess up. Unfortunately, Prime95 doesn't give any details as to WHAT hardware is possibly failing.

At least I now know SOMETHING is wrong for sure.

No log file written to disc You got that right

-kwag

The hardware failure is most likely memory related. You can choose different stress tests with the latest Prime95 version, maybe those would help in determining the problem area.

One good memory tester is Memtest86. Find it at http://www.memtest86.com/ . That one will surely tell you if it's the memory causing the problems.

Hi there,
You can also try http://www.memtest.org/ if Memtest86 fails.
They've made a derivate from memtest86 called memtest86+ because it didn't work well in several chipsets and didn't recognise Athlon64 at all.
Hope it helps.
Memtest86 helped me finding lots of bad memory sticks until now.
Cheers

__________________
Rui