VLC Player Freezing with Mac

[Pienamics]

I have a problem with VLC periodically freezing. I turned off all apps and anything else that might access the net. I’ve got DVDs ripped to a NAS drive as either .vob or DVDMEDA files. The DVDMEDIA files play perfectly with Mac’s DVD player and they both play perfectly with VLC when they are on the Mac’s hard drive. So I think that my network is fast enough and the NAS is serving OK and files are not corrupt.

I monitored the net usage using the Mac’s Activity Monitor app while VLC was playing and freezing. The following are the network data received per second reported at 2 second intervals with, as far as I can tell, only VLC accessing the network. Here are the results.


VLC playing OK
VLC playback Freezes
Data received per second as reported by Activity Monitor at 2 second intervals are….
856k
2.4M
3.7M
2M
2.2M
4.1M
2.1M
4.3M
2.3M
4.1M
2.1M
2.3M
4.1M
2.2M
4.2M
2.3M
3.7M
2.2M
3.8M
2.1M
1.9M
2.5M
50K
3.3M
VLC Starts to play again
Data received per second drops to bugger all
0
230
0
0
0
0
0
0
150
0
0
0
0
0
0
250
….. and about another 100 seconds of downloads in the range 0-250 Bits/second (that’s bits, not Megabits) until playback freezes, a slug of megabit downloads starts, and the whole cycle starts again.

So - it seems to load some data, play for a few minutes, download nothing while playing, then when the data run out it freezes until it’s downloaded enough data for another few minutes of playback.

I’ve tried changing the caching but entering a longer cache time just makes the freeze last longer - I assume because VLC has to fill a bigger buffer. In fact, the best way to watch it to set the caches to zero; this doesn’t stop the freezing, but the freezes are shorter.

The only way to watch the DVD rip without freezing is to download the whole file to the Mac’s hard drive - from where it works fine - or watch the DVDMEDIA files with the Mac's native DVD player app.

I’ve tried setting the VLC process priority to -20 (highest), but it makes no difference. There are no other apps running and Time Machine is off. The Mac isn’t indexing and as far as I can tell there’s nothing else using the CPU, disk or network that could be causing this.

It’s not a network rate issue. The same problem occurs if I’m sitting next to my router - except the freezes are shorter because it downloads at about 8-14MB/s.

The messages I get when VLC freezes are…

main error: \cf3 ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR is called too late (jitter of 50425 ms ignored)\
\cf2 main error: \cf3 ES_OUT_RESET_PCR called\

followed by lots of “buffering xx%” messages until playback re-starts.

Just to repeat - If I play the same files using the MAC DVD player or I download the file and play from HD I don’t get any problems, so it wouldn't appear to be a file error. It looks to me as if the network, server , file and Mac are all OK and this is a VLC issue - but note that I'm not a tecchie or a softie and I'm here for help - not to tell people who know more than me what the problem is.

Problem occurs with .vob and .dvdmedia files.

Setup: Macbook air - 10.9.4 - 8GB of RAM (I tried purging RAM but it made no difference Phys 8GB, Used 4.3GB, Virtual 8GB, Swap 0GB ). VLC 2.1.4

If there’s any help out there then it would be gratefully received.

I’m not a tecchie or a software expert and I’m not using VLC for anything else other than watching films.