So about a year ago I was using Apple’s Compressor, a video encoding application that comes with Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro. I was getting weird red blotches, glitches, skipping frames, etc.
After a week of debugging I just gave up, too much else to do. iDVD worked, so alright.
Last Thursday I was showing my friend Julie some iMovie stuff, which ended up as the now famous masturbating keyboard movie, but when I encoded in DVD SP, the video had glitches. “Oh, yeah, this issue I thought.”
So over the next three nights I messed around, reinstalling Compressor, etc. It would work, then I’d launch DVD SP and then the bad video. All the while, the people over on Apple – Discussions – Horrible quality were telling me it was bad RAM.
RAM doesn’t selectively decide that it hates Compressor. Why doesn’t it change “God” to “Dog” in my Word documents?
So after all I could think of, I pulled my RAM. I have 4 512mb sticks I got from the Mac store, all from Viking, bought with the G5 and later. The first bank is Nanya RAM, 64x64PC320016TM. The second bank is Infineon DDR64x64PC3200UT.
So I pulled the Infineon and guess what. It all works now. Every test I can run that would fail often enough to notice now succeeds.
I’ll be calling Viking to find out what RAM I really should have and what they can do about it.
For yucks, I took out the Nanya ram and installed the Infineon. Several apps crashed on boot, I could not export in Compressor and DVD SP crashed while encoding. So I am back on the Nanya ram, after having archived all of the crash logs then deleting them to see if I crash less now 🙂
Grrrr@computers!
update:
Viking is replacing all 4 sticks of RAM with memory they say is Dual G5 compatible. As they only cold swap, I’ll be sending in the two sticks known to not work first, then the other two after the replacements come. Viking does not have a hot swap policy. But it looks like I should be good to go and back on 2gb of ram within a few weeks!