Quicktime DV file don't play smoothly in VLC...

[patniemeyer]

I notice that when I export DV from Final Cut Pro (720x480) that VLC cannot play the files smoothly... I get about 2 frames a second on a Quad G5. The info screen shows the codec as "dvc". Quicktime has no trouble with this video... and if I explicitly export the video from quicktime as "DV Stream" and reduce it to 640x480 then VLC can play it smoothly...

I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on this. I am worried about long term archival of my DV and don't like the idea of storing in a format that VLC won't play.

thanks,
Pat

[fkuehne]

As far as I remember, VLC was never good at playing DV-video (or more precisely, ffmpeg's decoder is quite, well, ugly). If you want a archival format, which can be played by both QuickTime and VLC with good performance and nice quality, take H.264 with MPEG4-Audio in MPEG4-containers.
That's the best video codec you can get at the moment, although it isn't lossless. A bit rate of 1024 kbit/s is enough for HDTV and the forthcoming HD-DVDs. You can also take 2048 kbit/s, but I'm unsure about the playback performance then, even on such a fast Mac. Just try it out.

Since H.264 is an industrial standard, which is greatly pushed by QuickTime, HDTV-tuners and HD-DVDs, it will last for many years. The encoding times are problematic though: you won't get any real-time encoding on videos, which sizes are larger than a cigarette box, so exporting will take much longer than to DV.