The VideoLAN Forums

I convert video/movie film to video files for my customers. Have been doing so for 15 years. I always recommend VLC for my MAC users. I have had three users call THIS WEEK to say that the avi files start playing okay but eventually just become a scrambled/pixelated mess, can't see any video content. They play fine for me on my older mac which has an older version of VLC. The three customers all downloaded the current version of VLC. I verified the problem personally with one of the customers. Other two same issue.

I convert video/movie film to video files for my customers. Have been doing so for 15 years. I always recommend VLC for my MAC users. I have had three users call THIS WEEK to say that the avi files start playing okay but eventually just become a scrambled/pixelated mess, can't see any video content. They play fine for me on my older mac which has an older version of VLC. The three customers all downloaded the current version of VLC. I verified the problem personally with one of the customers. Other two same issue.

Are you using HEVC encoding?

I'm not sure how to answer your question. I am using Pinnacle Studio to create avi files upon importing video tapes.

Again, the files play fine on older versions of VLC.

Hi Jay:

I do the same thing you do for clients. I've always referred my Mac clients to VLC without issues. This weekend I got a call from a client. The family has four Mac computers. Oldest Mac computer played the files fine with Quicktime. For the other three, they downloaded VLC. For the three new computers with VLC the files play fine for about 19 minutes then VLC has serious playback issues. Doesn't matter which file on which drive on which of the three new Mac computers.

My files are specifically - AVI wrapped DV. DV files are created with broadcast hardware, are QC'd in an NLE timeline after ingest, then checksums are generated before the files are moved to client drives. Checksums run on client drives to insure proper file transfer without corruption, so it's not the files at issue here.

I wonder if you've found an answer or workaround or if anyone else has some input. Thanks!

I'd just like to follow up on the post I made several days ago. My client had loaded the latest version of VLC and was not able to play DV.AVI files past the 19 minute mark on three different Mac computers. They uninstalled the latest version of VLC, then loaded version 2.2.8. Everything is playing fine now. So I suggest versions above 2.2.8 may have some issues that still need to be worked out. Version 2.2.8 seems to be the last stable version for DV.AVI file playback on a newer Macintosh computer. The upload is here: https://get.videolan.org/vlc/2.2.8/macosx/vlc-2.2.8.dmg

Have the same issue with AVI files on MacBook Pro (macOS 10.13.5, 13-inch, Mid 2012, 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB):

- VLC version 2.0.10 (32 bit) can play video without issues.
- VLC version 3.0.3 (64 bit) start playing, its ok for about 5 sec, after that video freezes, but time indicator still increases.

Please disable hardware decoding in preferences.