Video/sound sync trouble, need help...?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Howdy. For awhile now, I've been having trouble with audio/video sync in several games. Beyond Good and Evil had totally out-of-sync cutscenes, the Legacy of Kain series had some of it, and some games (Blood Omen 2, Moment of Silence) actually had to slow down the video in order to play the sound, and then stop the sound and play video at normal speed (at about 2-second intervals) in order to keep up without falling out of sync.

Well, theoretically my peecy should have handled these games well, but I put it down to "new games, not so new peecy" and put up with it.

But it's also happening to AGS games, I've found. A movie file in an AGS game will find the sound lagging terribly. Both sound and video appear to run at the correct speed, but the sound will soon be several seconds out of sync with the video, lagging behind. And it gets worse with time (meaning, the movie's time).

I have had no problems with, say, Media Player or whatnot, and not every game has this problem (though just about every AGS game does). My drivers are up to date, and I have DirectX 9.0c. I hope this is the latest, Windows Update doesn't let me update anymore because of the blasted "legitimacy verification" thing, but that's another issue.

...so. That's it. Can anyone help lil' ol' me?

[Mr Jake]

You could try going to run -> "dxdiag" and turning down (or up - I cant remember, which ever one it isn't) the "Hardware Acceleration" slider.

I had the sync problem with Outlaws, and doing this fixed it.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

A most intriguing notion which I wish I could answer by saying "That did it! Amazing! I love you!". Sadly, I can't, because the problem remains, independently of the setting I try the Hardware Acceleration slider. I still love you, though.

[Barbarian]

What version of Windows are you running? What is your sound card?

Not sure if the following suggestions may help:

Disable any programs that are running in the background that are not essential for when playing your game(s).

Do a scan on your system for Viruses and Spyware that may be lurking.

If you've not done so in a while, doing a "Defrag" of the hard-drive(s) may help in performance too.

    If the problem still persists, we'll try to think of finding another solution.
Best of luck.

[nihilyst]

I also have an out-of-sync problem at the Beyond Good & Evil cutscenes. But it definitely hasn't something to do with my system performance, since it worked when I first played it. Don't know, what it could be either.

[Mr Flibble]

I had this problem in Grim Fandango, but sometimes it happened sometimes it didn't.

Curiously, if you started a new game and the dialogue was out of sync, then you saved and restarted and the dialogue was in sync, if you loaded the saved game the audio would suddenly go out of sync again. Suggesting a programming or timing bug rather than a processor power thing.

It was a most intriguing problem which I never resolved, as I was able to start a game with proper syncing.

If you play a movie file from an AGS game just in, say, Media Player, does it work okay?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Barbarian, my peecy is an Intel Celeron CPU 2.40GHz, 512MB RAM, running XP Pro SP2, and device manager says my card's a C-Media AC97 audio device. Disabling background programs, Spybot+AdAware and defrag all failed to solve this, although my peecy does seem to be breathing easier, overall, so thanks for that.

Flibble - funny, I never had it then. Or rather, not *back then*. Maybe this is a recent problem. Could it be related to the number video codecs I have installed? And ayuh, playing a movie file from AGS in media player works fine. And I must say that I noticed that, in one game, the movie file was ONLY video. The audio was being played on AGS, apparently, not part of the video file. Which is a bit of an extra spin. Previous experiences of mine, with videos from Phantasmagoria 2, also gave me this problem.