The VideoLAN Forums

Hello. I have searched the internets to the best of my ability and have not found anyone looking for a solution to my issue, so here is my first post.

I am using VLC 1.1.11 on a MacBook Pro 10.6.8. I notice this problem with .mkv files but it might happen for all hi-res video.

During playback, it looks like the video gets gradually more pixelated (please excuse me if I'm not using the correct words) for several seconds and then suddenly jolts back to being perfectly clear. This happen continuously in a cycle through the playback. Going from perfectly clear to more and more blurry, then jolting back to clear. Granted, the maximum blur, just before it gets clear again, is not extreme but it is noticeable, especially when it becomes clear again one frame later. There are no other issues that I've found will all files. The framerate is fine and I can seek smoothly.

How can I get my .mkv files to play continuously clearly? Thank you.

While some movies can just be poorly encoded, you may have enabled the "Skip loop filter" that some people enable for performance but can have a negative effect on video quality.

Check in Preferences -> ALL -> Input / Codecs -> Video codecs -> FFmpeg

...and set "Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding" to None. You'll then need to close and reopen the video. If yours is already set to none then maybe something else is at fault.

This did solve the problem! Thank you. I'm surprised that I wasn't able to find this simple solution in a pre-existing thread. Maybe I just didn't search hard enough.