The VideoLAN Forums

Hi there!

I recently updated my Mac Powerbook 17'' G4 (1.25 GHz CPU) with Leopard.

I now have a problem again that had occured with previous versions of VLC in Tiger, but seemed to have gone away with the latest version.

While watching a movie (avi), most of the time when you hear the harddisk work for half a second (probably loading the next batch of data to play), the picture and sound freezes, and then jumps to the point in the timecode where the movie should be, had it run smoothly. It's not always the same amount of time it freezes, and there are some times when the harddisk works, but playback keeps running smoothly.

What could cause the picture and sound to freeze? Is a 1.25 GHz CPU too slow for smooth playback? Like I said, all was fine with VLC 0.86 in Tiger.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, 'cause it's really an annoying problem...

Greets
Lambsilencer

i can confirm exactly the same behaviour on my blackbook 2Ghz, leopard 10.5.1, vlc 0.8.6d ..

-mp-

Hi there!

I recently updated my Mac Powerbook 17'' G4 (1.25 GHz CPU) with Leopard.

I now have a problem again that had occured with previous versions of VLC in Tiger, but seemed to have gone away with the latest version.

While watching a movie (avi), most of the time when you hear the harddisk work for half a second (probably loading the next batch of data to play), the picture and sound freezes, and then jumps to the point in the timecode where the movie should be, had it run smoothly. It's not always the same amount of time it freezes, and there are some times when the harddisk works, but playback keeps running smoothly.

What could cause the picture and sound to freeze? Is a 1.25 GHz CPU too slow for smooth playback? Like I said, all was fine with VLC 0.86 in Tiger.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, 'cause it's really an annoying problem...

Greets
Lambsilencer

are you sure its not a background process kicking in, cause leopard is good for doing that. in leopard sometimes a background process can start up taking 50%+ CPU time away which would make VLC skip around wile watching a video. who knows this might not be the issue, but its a start.

i have seen a few divx movies perform poorly but its due to a high quality of the video, BTW does it only do it with .AVI videos or with any video. if it only does it with divx videos then it must be a VLC issue. but if it does it with all videos then it could be a background issue. videos in a .mkv are poor performers anyway no matter what codec they are in (altho not related to your issue), and they are the only the real issue's i run into. but i don't see allot of jumping around wile playing a video in leopard. when i have issues in leopard and VLC the sound continues to play uninterrupted and its just the video that stutters a little bit.

now when i am watching a video stream the video will get corrupt and freeze and the sound will continue to play fine in leopard, now in tiger wile watching the same stream the video and sound will breakup and get corrupt and sometimes lockup and never correct itself but the data transfer is still going, but if i hit stop and play the video and sound will work again (again not really related to your issue).

i am running Tiger/Leopard dual boot on a G4

yea, i'm pretty sure it's not some other process using the cpu.. tho whole system has around 70% of idle time during the playback..
also quite sure it happens only while playing divx/xvid movies..

but your right about the audio - it continues to play ok, while video lags behind a bit... still really annoying.. :/

-mp-

i dont know if it will help or not, have you tried deleting VLC's prefs files and running VLC again to see if it cures it.

i dont know if it will help or not, have you tried deleting VLC's prefs files and running VLC again to see if it cures it.

yup, tried that.. no cure..

-mp-

update: just tried the latest nightly build http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/mac ... 4-1400.dmg and it seems to be running smoothly so far.. at least with this XVID movie.. i guess t might be because it is compiled on a new leopard system..

-mp-