1080p studders

[leftkidney]

so I have a good computer so I should have no problem playing these files - Windows Media Player playes them fine, no problems

mobo - ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
ram - 2x2GB 4GB total OCZ 1066mhz
cpu - Intel Q6600 G0 overclocked to 3.2GHz
gpu - ATI HD4850 512MB DDR3

the HD dont matter I have tried it from several internal HD's including a RAID 0 with 2 Raptor 10,000 RPM sata 300

during playback of high bit rate 1080p .mkv files (like 8-12 mbps) when they get "intense" or have a lot of stuff going on (in Madagascar 2 when the zebras are moving around, and in Band of Brothers when there are a lot of explosions and stuff, and in Walli-e when he is in space and puts his hand up to touch the rings of Saturn, it chugs big time there) it drops frames like a crack dealer drops crack when the cops are coming

the computer plays blu-ray movies fine with the blu-ray sony drive I have and they are over 20 mbps at all times mostly - yea it is VC1 or WMV9 whatever is on blu-ray's and I know that .mkv is more taking on computers - but it plays fine using windows media player

[VLC_help]

VLC and Windows Media Player use different decoders. VLC decoder can't do multithreaded decoding nor use GPU decoding. If you want to use VLC, try loop filter trick
http://wiki.videolan.org/WindowsFAQ-0.9 ... s_too_slow

[leftkidney]

works a charm mate thanks a lot

does this have any effect on quality of the picture


in the future will vlc have support for multi threading and/or gpu playback

[VLC_help]

Disabling Loop filter does some harm to image quality, but it is usually only visible on low bitrates. And multithreaded decoding will come once libavcodec devs merge it to stable branch.

[leftkidney]

at the risk of sounding like a traitor - is there another video player that does a, um, better? job with x264/h264 stuff?

[VLC_help]

DivX has free H.264 decoder that supports multithreading. Media Player Classic Home Cinema has GPU accelerated H.264 decoder.

[wifebeater]

just interesting, despite 1080p studders, task manager shows about 50% cpu usage (Intel dual core graphs: 20% and 70%), why? doesn't task manager display the cpu usage correctly, or is the reason of studding other than cpu performance? speed of the memory bus?
i have tested VLC with 3 computers: in one pc (xp, e8500, 4GB of dual channel RAM, HD2600XT) any 1080p runs without any problems. in other computers (vista, e5200, 1G single chan RAM, integrated G33; xp, e8400, 1G single chan RAM, integrated nvidia7100) problematic 1080p clips don't run absolutely, stopped picture on most of time.

[VLC_help]

Problem is CPU performance related. If VLC cannot decode frames fast enough, it will try to skip frames to keep up the sync between audio and video.

If you want more accurate CPU usage statistics, you should try too called Process Explorer.

[leftkidney]

after changing the settings so it plays correctly I notice chroma changes in the content that happen at certain points in the playback - I can navigate back and watch the same part again and again and I will see it again and again in the same spot - if I turn the option back to default then this goes away at those points but I get dropped frames whenever it is "intense" on screen

the color goes from a nice normal to a dingy greenish look and back again and again at random points - the strangest thing is that it always happens at the same point if you navigate back giving the impression that it must be in the source - but thats not the case because I can play it using another player (or vlc with the option back to default) and it dont do that - it must be something in the source causing this to happen but it only happens when I change the option for the settings that was provided in the responce to the first question

[mehrotra.akash]

somehow 1080p videos(have only tried 2-3 minutes versions) work fine on my laptop with a 1.8Ghz C2d, 2GB RAM, vista business and intel integrated graphics.
played on a 14 inchg screen, so the HD video quality was only marginally better than original DVD

[VLC_help]

There are different type of 1080p material. Not all 1080p videos require so much calculations nor they are encoded with same settings. So it is completely natural that some 1080p videos play without issues and others will show some errors (specially with loop filter trick).

[leftkidney]

its not like its one or the other, it happens at a point in the video that you can go back to and see again at the same point - but on other players this dont happen

so really I have only some 1080p files (I am backing up my blu-ray collection and putting it on a server) so I use vlc all the time for most all videos except for high bit rate 1080p files - maybe when HD file get into the norm vlc will be working like it was sosposta work but cant because of limitations that are out of the control of developers