BGVideos Freezing

[Excel]

I have a couple of songs that notably freeze randomly during Stepmania play. Generally by freeze, I mean that the arrows/video stop moving while the music still plays, causing me to miss multiple steps later.

These songs have their own avis that last throughout the song and are quite big in size, I guess. Probably 12+ MB.

I reinstalled Windows XP, and for a little while, I don't think Stepmania froze to these songs. Running Stepmania later, the freezing started again.

The versions I used are: Stepmania 4 alpha 4, sm-ssc rc1.5
Specs are:
Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo CPU
T5750 @ 2.00 GHz
1.66 GHz, 3.49 GB of RAM


Is there any way to possibly remove the freezing while still playing with the BGvideos on?
Thank you!

[shakesoda]

the filesize isn't a problem, it's an issue with how SM handles certain divx videos.

encoding with theora or something should work fine

[Excel]

Ah, I see.
Would that mean though that I would have to encode each video file and then change each .sm file?

[shakesoda]

yeah, as inconvenient as it is.

[Excel]

Alright, just checking to see that I'm taking the right path.

After converting one of the videos to .ogv format with ffmpeg2theora, the video is scrambled in Stepmania 4. Is this anything else I need to download and then install from the desktop?

Also, on a random test in OpenITG, the build crashes. Is there anything I can do to make this build recognize .ogv?

Thanks again.

[shakesoda]

only SM4 supports ogv.

I've never had them appear scrambled though, maybe try encoding with different settings?

[Excel]

Been testing some of it out.

The videoquality has quite of an effect on the visuals. The lower the quality, the less scrambled it gets. Generally setting it to a videoquality of 3 would have half and half of slightly blurry visuals and scrambled-ness. A videoquality of 1 would mostly be somewhat blurry visuals, with few scrambling.

Would there be anything else to download to possibly help this?