The VideoLAN Forums

im running a santa rosa macbook with latest leopard patches.

my player randomly freezes video playback during play. sound still plays just video stops and cant get it to start up by ff/rewinding. i need to reopen the file to get it to go again. it doesnt seem to depend on what type file and doesnt seem to caused by any of my other programs as it has happened even when nothing is running in the background. this happened before the latest vlc 0.9 patch and persisted even with the new patch.

anyone have a problem like this or perhaps a solution? maybe weird subtle background process?

tia.

What kinds of video files are you watching?

That thing happens to me a lot when I watch mkv files. That filetype is really buggy, sometimes the picture stops randomly (but sometimes it's ok again after a few seconds) and it makes my VLC crash quite often.

0.9.3 should improve the display speed significantly. We were using a higher quality scaling algorithm, but it was proving to be a bit too taxing for many of our users.

I've noticed this happening to me too, however, it only started AFTER I upgraded to 0.9.3. I at first thought it was just my HD files that are doing this, but even my SD quality AVI TV shows were doing it to.

I'm not sure it's the same thing, but for me at least for me, the video would be playing properly then all of a sudden the video would freeze on that frame and the audio would keep going. I would either have to hit pause then play (causing the image to become all weird and boxy till the image goes to what it should be) or I have to seek somewhere else and then go back.

The same files played properly using Perain (1.1.1)/QT as well as MPlayer.

With any video in a .mkv container the whole video file has to be prossesed, you can see it happening with peran in QT.just look at the time slider bar in QT with perain when you load a movie thats in a .mkv container it will show the slider but it will also show a progress bar within the slider bar. when its prossesing the video file it will take up allot of cpu time when in vlc and making the video to skip around ( in vlc it dont show a progress bar in the time slider bar like QT or in Mplayer does)

VLC isnt a good choice to play back any .mkv videos in OS X, for that i use Mplayer or Niceplayer (niceplayer i think is only for PPC Macs). i mainly use Niceplayer to play back movies in a .mkv container in OS X cause it gives me the best performance, but i have to wait for the file to finish prossesing before i can play back the video at a watchable speed. since i have a Digital Audio G4 533 VLC isnt a option for me to play back .mkv videos cause VLC dont correctly handle them.

now on my PC running VLC .mkv videos play very well and dont have a issue. it only takes around 10% - 14% CPU time to play back .mkv videos that are very high quality. so far i have not found anything that wont play in VLC for windows.