Best operating system for AVS stability?

[swingdjted]

I'm just curious, because I'm considering buying Windows 7.

I currently run Windows Vista Home Premium (64 bit). I use a box built in 2008 with an Intel Core2Quad Q9550 processor with 16GB DDR2800 RAM and a GE Force GTX 260 video card.

Running AVS on this box almost never lasts more than 5 presets before crashing, and it crashes on random presets, not the same preset all the time.

Does the choice between 32 bit and 64 bit affect AVS stability? (I realize 64 bit is necessary for 4MB+ memory use).

Which between XP, Vista, 7, or 7 in XP mode seems to be most stable? (Windows 7 with XP mode costs more than versions without, but I'm willing to pay if it makes AVS work a lot better).

Related question - does AVS work in Mac's Bootcamp (just curious)?

I really miss being able to use AVS on a regular basis; milkdrop is fine, but AVS seemed to be a lot better in certain ways (for example I used to render pictures and text a lot with it and add clips of the resulting visualization to videos). Is there anything that I can do to bring back AVS in a relatively stable form on a newer computer?

[Yathosho]

Originally posted by swingdjted
Running AVS on this box almost never lasts more than 5 presets before crashing, and it crashes on random presets, not the same preset all the time.

presets using global variables will always crash on vista and windows 7 once you load a new preset.

I realize 64 bit is necessary for 4MB+ memory use).

no, but 4gb - so there shouldn't be a difference when it comes to avs!

Which between XP, Vista, 7, or 7 in XP mode seems to be most stable? (Windows 7 with XP mode costs more than versions without, but I'm willing to pay if it makes AVS work a lot better).

i wouldn't use a terribly outdated os like xp just to get "better" results in avs. unless you use your computer exclusively for avs.

Related question - does AVS work in Mac's Bootcamp (just curious)?

yes

[Warrior of the Light]

^ I had better results in win98 than I had with XP (more stable too). The only thing that doesn't work is alpha blending the AVS window itself, but who cares really. (ancient as it may be, but if your machine is only for AVS...)

Also take a look at this thread and search around a bit. There's plenty to find in the dusty archives

When it comes to hardware: I believe a strong single-core system still beats a slower multi-core CPU, since AVS only uses 1 for all of its calculations.

[swingdjted]

It wouldn't be incredibly hard for me to build a box (at relatively minimum cost) with an old 3.4GHz Pentium 4 (one fast core) and toss XP or 98 on it, but I was really hoping to just include AVS on the box I regularly use, which has 2.83GHz per core speed.

I guess what I'm saying is that although I'd be willing to pay a bit more to make my current box more avs friendly, I guess I'm not as willing to build an entire box just for AVS. Most of my hardware needs revolve around renders and transcoding, where high RAM (used for a RAMdisc), and multicore processing come into play, whereas it seems AVS is best with Windows 98 plus a really fast core.

originally posted by QOAL (on the counting thread)
I believe AVS uses direct draw, to render to the screen, which was dropped by mircosoft ages ago.

I don't know anything about this, but is this why newer operating systems don't allow AVS to be as stable?

I wish there were some magic wand that when waved would allow AVS to be stable with a current operating system while making use of multicore processors and other hardware that has improved since the old days. I really like AVS and can't think of any other program that has the functionality that AVS has.

The mac question was based on my next work computer - the school I work for is transitioning to all Macs - a low-end model for every student and staff member running snow leopard, possibly capable of running bootcamp. I'm curious to know if I can use that thing to do some AVS work. Currently they have me using a really high-end HP laptop, which will make me cry when they pry it out of my hands and replace it with a low-end mac. Either way, the home box will stay the same.

I'm sorry I bugged you guys with the thread; I guess there's no workaround for the truth - AVS just can't work as it used to on newer OS's without someone stepping up and making enormous changes, something I don't have the competencies to do.

[Yathosho]

i must say, i remember avs crashing on xp once in a while. apart from the know bug with gvm, avs has never crashed for me in almost one year of using win 7 (better direct x?). i know that sounds hard to believe and it might have been pure luck.

about that gvm bug, i'm not sure if this happens on all vista/win7 versions, i'm using a 64-bit version myself and it crashes. according to micro.d it crashes on 32-bit vista as well, so it's safe to assume it will happen on 32-bit win7. also, the gvm plugin works perfectly on 64-bit xp.

also, avs does benefit from multiple cores, at least that's what micro.d and myself found out. you might find our results in this forum by searching for "benchmark". i'm not sure if you can just compare the clock rate of a cpu (p4 vs many-cores), i'm sure new generations of cpus have other optimizations as well. one thing for sure, those old p4s suck more power, produce more heat and hence allow no companct form-factors (which is worth consideration when you play visuals abroad).

[swingdjted]

Direct X would be version 11 in windows 7, right? I'm not an expert at that sort of thing, but I'm guessing you're saying that helps the stability of AVS? An old xp box would be running DirectX 9 I guess. Is this true for Windows 7 in XP mode?

Yeah, the Core2 technology is supposed to make more out of a core than the Pentium class clocked at the same speed, but I didn't know if that was true for AVS or not.

It sounds like you're saying that if I use an old P4 for AVS, I'll need a pretty good sized cooler attached if I run something as cpu intensive as AVS on it.

What I mostly want to do is be able to run single presets that I create with rendered pics/text for recording clips onto a video, or when I'm not busy with a big project, I like to sit back and watch AVS run on a projector while listening to music. In that case, I like smooth transitions with as few crashes as possible.

I might be doing some DJ work again this year too (I got away from it over the last 2 years). Some people have asked me to work my brother-in-law's wedding, the high school where I work's prom, and possibly a staff party for our district. It would be nice to run AVS for those events, although to avoid dead air on a crash, I might just run one computer with line-in AVS and the other playing music. If that becomes more fantasy than reality I might just stick with the music and not the visuals.

Maybe what I need to do when I buy 7 is just learn how to duel-boot to XP-64 (I still have a student license/disc from back in the day) rather than get a version of 7 with xp-mode?

[micro.D]

dual booting win7-xp is easy: install xp first and then win7 it'll recognize your xp. the avs stuff: if you run avs on win7 and don't want to badger with it too much collect some presets in a folder what has no Global Variable Manager in it (you'll see it in the treeview on the left side in the avs editor as Misc / Global Variables) and under settings / presets/hotkeys you can tell avs from wich folder it should pick up random presets. after that obviously set it to random. it should be stable at least for 2 hours.

[swingdjted]

I think that this might be my best option. Perhaps XP-64 + Windows 7 Home Premium-64 (need at least home premium for windows media center with my TV card) is best? I guess if I want AVS I boot to XP-64, and boot to 7 for everything else.

After backing everything up and making sure I have all my install discs/files, and after wiping/installing XP-64, do I just toss the new 7 disc in and follow directions, or do I need to put it on a separate partition/drive? I've never set up duel-boot before. If successful, is there something I have to do to select which os to use when I turn the computer on?

[Warrior of the Light]

The first google result for 'how to dual boot' You'll find more and better results

[swingdjted]

I guess with all the ways to do it I was just looking for one way that someone around here recommended. It seems that they want XP first, so I doubt I can keep my current vista with programs and settings, but that's not that big a deal; I can reinstall/reset it all over time in 7. I don't see much reason to keep Vista anyway.

I sure hope that I get better luck with AVS on either XP 64. I miss it.

[swingdjted]

Followup - I picked up Windows 7 Ultimate x64 a while back (just after posting this thread), and AVS crashed a lot initially. I then tried disabling Aero (Windows glassy theme), and AVS works very well. I found a way to make the winamp shortcut automatically disable Aero when launching, and it automatically re-enables Aero when closing Winamp. If anyone wants the procedure for doing this, post here and I'll explain.

[Warrior of the Light]

I'm using W7 x64 home on the laptop. I'm assuming there are not many differences between the two flavours. Please tell me about that shortcut.

[DrO]

right-click on winamp.exe and go to the compatiblity tab and i'd assume it's the 'Disable desktop composition' option which needs to be checked.

-daz

[swingdjted]

^that's exactly it:

Post number 9 on this thread makes it extra easy (same directions):

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=321482

[Yathosho]

why install an extra OS when virtualisation performs about as good as a booted operating system - when you have a processor with vt-support. if you really believe that avs performs better on that old xp, the xp-mode should be good enough, though it's only available for pro and ultimate.

if this thread proves anything, it's that it's not just the os influencing stability - it's hardware and the quality of drivers. as i said before, avs used to crash frequently back in the day for me (on xp), but since i upgraded to w7 i had not a single crash - unless i ran across a preset with an unsupported ape.

so please, don't generalize! i doesn't help anyone.

[swingdjted]

I apologize if I am misleading anyone on what the root causes of instability instances of AVS could be. I'm just going with personal experience (mostly trial and error), which could be different from that of others, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't have a lot of training when it comes to the details.

Some observations on what I have tried:
When I use XP mode on 7 Ultimate, the task manager only shows heavy use of one core of the processor when using AVS. I don't believe it allows for the use of multiple cores the way AVS does when I just use regular Windows 7. Other programs that allow multiple core use don't show heavy use on more than one core in XP mode either on my computer. As you could infer from this, there is a noticeable, significant corresponding increase in framerate when I just use 7 without the xp mode, at least on this machine. With plain 7, all 4 cores are used heavily by AVS.

With Aero enabled, I couldn't get almost anything to work on AVS (crashed almost instantly on lots of different types of basic presets, even in windowed mode), but I didn't know this was the problem until doing a lot of idea-based trial-and-error troubleshooting. When I discovered that disabling Aero makes it suddenly stable (except as you say, when you come up with an unsupported ape), I never really attempted to understand the reasoning or details behind it, I just sorta jumped for joy that I could finally enjoy AVS again in a mostly stable environment, something that I really missed. I'm very happy now that I can use today's computers to finally provide smooth framerates at high resolutions, something I waited for, for a lot of years.

I'm glad that you, a person that understands the technical aspects of this more than I do, are willing to post about it, because it can help readers understand better what is going on. It helps me and other readers when we are troubleshooting issues.

I have some questions now - do you have Aero enabled when you have AVS running in a stable way?
Do you believe that this has more intervening variables, in such a way that Aero could be enabled and AVS still be stable for people with different hardware or drivers than mine?
You say AVS crashed frequently with XP while I say XP kept my AVS very stable. Do you feel that this shows that the operating system isn't as big a factor as things like drivers/hardware? (I get the impression this is your message, but I just wanted to confirm.)

Sorry about the wall of text, but despite being relatively uninformed about this stuff, I really would like to learn as much as I can on the topic, especially since AVS is something I value a lot. Thanks for continuing to give input.

[Yathosho]

Originally Posted by swingdjted

I have some questions now - do you have Aero enabled when you have AVS running in a stable way?

yes, i have it enabled. i have a geforce gts 250 and i frequently update the nvidia drivers. i say this assuming that the gpu handles most of aero.

Do you believe that this has more intervening variables, in such a way that Aero could be

Originally Posted by swingdjted

enabled and AVS still be stable for people with different hardware or drivers than mine?
You say AVS crashed frequently with XP while I say XP kept my AVS very stable. Do you feel that this shows that the operating system isn't as big a factor as things like drivers/hardware?

at first i thought it was simply that i used avs more intensively when i was on xp, but thinking again this isn't quite true. i have been using the windows 7 final for about 10 months now, but before that i already used the release candidate since it came out in april 2009. i replaced my xp computer with an entirely new machine, so i can't make an exact comparison. all i can say is, that i used the same vendors for cpu (intel), mainboard (intel), ram (kingston hyper-x) and graphics card (nvidia). you'd probably have to compare the usage of avs and the kind of presets you're into. a lot of people are still enjoying those very basic presets that look like those that came with the first avs version. i was intensively using aps like convolution filters and colormaps in my days of making presets. compared to my xp-times, i'm using more experimental settings like smp support (i think for 4 threads). my other avs settings must have remained unchanged (except for desktop mode, as it doesn't work in w7), which is usually going for better quality and less performance (wait for retrace etc.)

edit: i think i was using 7-max on my last xp installation, according to its author it can cause an unstable os!

edit2: for a long period in my active time (probably the longest), i was actually using windows 2003 server, but i don't remember any differences when it comes to crashing compared to xp. however, before xp sp2 came out (or was it sp3?), windows 2003 was considered more stable than xp and it also performed slightly as it didn't come with a lot of consumer gimmicks!

[swingdjted]

I use an Intel (Core2Quad) Q9550 processor and a EVGA nVidia GE Force GTX 260 video card on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R motherboard. This setup is usually perfect for my needs for a lot of programs, but it has caused some problems too. It didn't allow .NET Framework 3.5 or higher to install under the Vista operating system, which prevented installs of many programs. Dozens of calls to Microsoft, even while letting them control my computer remotely several times couldn't seem to solve the issue. This is one of the biggest reasons I switched to Windows 7.

The last computer I used for a lot of AVS was a Dell Dimension 8100 (very early intel P4 processor, 1.3GHz, with an old nvidia card on an AGP port). It came with Windows ME (slight pause while I vomit after typing that), but I quickly upgraded to XP when it was released. Needless to say, the computer I use now is quite different than the old one, but that old one did run AVS quite well at lower resolutions, and almost never crashed with AVS unless it was my fault when trying to write or edit presets.

[Crazy Dave]

I am having an issue with the convolution filter using win7 x64. Just a heads up on that. The APE loads but it looks like no effect is applied. I have tried to turn multi-threading on and off, no change.

It kinda pisses me off because one of my best preset I made uses it.

[Warrior of the Light]

Which avs version are you using?

If you're using 2.83 (currently bundled I believe), do the world a favor: remove it and install 2.81d and/or 2.9.
Others still prefer 2.81b.

get 2.81d
get 2.9
I don't have 2.81b right here but you can extract it from any 5.1x to 5.4 release I think (rough guess).

[DrO]

Originally Posted by Warrior of the Light

If you're using 2.83 (currently bundled I believe), do the world a favor: remove it and install 2.81d and/or 2.9.

you'll be happy to know that 2.81d is going back in as the shipped version. alas i loss on getting it completely removed and offered as a submission download on winamp.com instead of being in the installer *shrugs*

-daz

[Warrior of the Light]

It's great to hear, but I now see in what position that puts you now..
Sorry for all your hard work. I hope you know we really appreciate your efforts. Too bad the outcome wasn't more stable.

[swingdjted]

Originally Posted by Warrior of the Light

I hope you know we really appreciate your efforts.

X2

AVS in general has removed work stress from me many times. Big thanks to all who are involved in producing the end product that is displayed on my screen when I need a break.