Discrepancy

My friends and I just built a MAME-only cabinet using an SSD as the system drive. GameEx is indeed installed there and is quite snappy - during testing I tried installing all of the ROMs we had at the time (<30GB), plus all other resources (artwork, vids, etc.) onto the SSD since there was room. The speed difference was negligible - I'm sure it was snappier, but it was already fast enough that it didn't make an appreciable difference. I think it is sufficient to have GameEx installed on the SSD and either use another internal HDD or even a network-attached drive for ROMs and resources. I have been pleased with the caching. Unfortunately, even having everything on the SSD did not make an impact on the random "long freezes" when exiting games back to GameEx, and sometimes in exiting GameEx itself. That battle goes on, but I have been otherwise quite pleased with GameEx on the SSD C: drive and everything else on a 7200 RPM D: drive. Edit: I should also point out that I installed the emulator (MAMEUI64) on the SSD as well.

For the record, I had the exact same symptoms as DJ Infinity but on a Win 7 32-bit setup. The shark pack hadn't fixed it for me before, but seeing this thread made me try it again and play with the settings. It boiled down to a setting on the H264 tab - the default is to "Use Microsoft codec," but as Tom pointed out, that doesn't support it well and results in these weird playback issues within GameEx. I chose "Use FFDshow's codec" instead and that fixed the problem. Having fought with this problem since September, I had quite a facepalm moment when it turned out to be as simple as one radio button. =) I'm just thankful it's resolved!

Ooh, the plot thickens! I did re-download all of the SNES MP4s, this time using the Download Service Utility 0.90 (before I just pulled them off of the FTP), but ended up with the same result. Then, a random test case occurred. While flipping through games, I happened upon Mortal Kombat II for the Sega 32X. The video snap for this is in MP4, and it played just fine... until Liu Kang beats Baraka at the end of round 1 (about 18 seconds). The game screen in the video fades out, but never fades back in - even though you can hear round 2 commence! I exited GameEx and went to watch this video in WMP, and sure enough, the video does fade back in to show round 2 of the fight. Now I'm curious if there is something in the nature of the fade-in of the SNES videos that is causing GameEx not to display the video. I'm going to see about chopping the fade portion out of one of these videos altogether to see if it plays then. I also just read something about GameEx seeking past the 1 second mark to avoid the fades, perhaps I should look into that a little more. Update: Failure Gspot didn't see any differences between one set of MP4s and another, so I doubt it has to do with the way they were encoded. I did find the AVIFrameSkip setting in GameEx.ini, but as the name implies I don't think it did anything for the MP4s. At any rate, since I haven't seen anyone else having this particular problem, I figure it must be me. I ended up downloading the old AVIs for SNES; they work. If I ever do get the MP4s figured out, I'll post the solution here just in case anyone else happens to encounter this. Update 2: SUCCESS! Shark007 never resolved it for me so I had uninstalled it (I'm one of "those people" who likes to stay away from codec packs if I can help it), but seeing this thread resolved with my exact symptoms gave me renewed hope. I went back and downloaded the latest Shark pack (3.3.5 at the time of this writing). It still didn't work out-of-the-box, but after playing with the settings, I finally found what worked: Shark007 Settings app -> H264 Tab -> H264 codec in DirectShow Players -> choose "Use FFDshow's codec". The default here was to "Use Microsoft codec." This codec does not support MP4s well enough and was resulting in the strange playback issues I was having. Voila! Hope that helps someone in the future.

Windows 7 32 bit, still on K-Lite: the MP4s are all running fine externally (under VLC and even windows media player). I suppose I could re-get the files anyway, but otherwise I'm scratching my head. EDIT: I did consider re-encoding them in the extreme case that I can't figure anything else out, but otherwise no, I haven't touched them.

The Shark007 pack definitely helped, with one odd exception - the SNES snaps in MP4 format play as audio only, but The SMS and NES snaps in MP4 are running just fine (all are from EmuMovies). I wonder if there was something different in the way that the SNES snap set was encoded? I even tried switching to the K-Lite pack, but got the same result. Perhaps some magical setting I need to tweak within Shark?