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hesitation, popping when playing large MKV files

Posted: 24 Jun 2012 17:02
by mikep1
Using VLC v2 on a dual core system running WinXP

Most videos play ok, but I'm having trouble with large BR rip MKV files. Not sure if it's related, but the audio is DTS configured for passthru.

What I see is a hesitation in the video, a slight pause/jump in the video playback, regularly about every 20s or so. When I run the windows task manager, what I see is the CPUs running around 30-40% busy, and a slow rising level of physical memory allocation (like a ramp). Then the CPUs will spike and the RAM use will suddenly drop concurrent with the video hesitation (I see a continuous sawtooth trace on the memory usage plot).

I have a second issue with the audio in the same MKV files (DTS passthrough), I'm not sure if it's related. If I fast forward or skip ahead, I'll get occasional very, very load POPs in the audio. I've turned off time stretching as mentioned in another post, to no avail.

The same videos play fine over windows media player with much less memory use.

Am I missing a setting somewhere?

Mike

Re: hesitation, popping when playing large MKV files

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:18
by Lotesdelere
Try another video output module:
http://wiki.videolan.org/WindowsFAQ-2.0 ... _output.3F

You can also try to enable or disable some video options such as Overlay and/or Hardware YUV -> RGB conversions.

And/or disable/enable GPU acceleration:
http://wiki.videolan.org/WindowsFAQ-2.0 ... age_errors

Re: hesitation, popping when playing large MKV files

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 03:18
by mikep1
Thanks for helping me out, these FAQs were what I needed, sorry I didn't see them before.

I needed to change my video output from "default" to DirectX, when I did the hesitation and memory usage went away.

For the audio I've selected win32 wave output, but since the problem is intermittant I'm not sure if it's been solved - if not, I'll post back here.

Thanks again!

Mike

Re: hesitation, popping when playing large MKV files

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 23:29
by mikep1
Reporting back - it seems that using the win32 wave output did fix the popping problem, thanks!

I have a different but perhaps related issue now - if I jump ahead when playing a movie with DTS output over SPDIF, VLC seems to loose synchronization between the video and audio tracks, or sometimes the audio gets dropped completely (when using the directx audio output, this was when I'd often get the loud popping). It seems like VLC struggles to get the DTS output going properly, my amplifier often keeps showing and dropping(?) the DTS symbol. I suspect the VLC player because if I go into the audio settings and switch from DTS output to 5.1, then back to DTS, the audio starts coming out fine and properly sync'd.

Am I missing some other setting or doing something else wrong?

Mike