The VideoLAN Forums

#1: Almost all of my MKV files skip a lot / play really choppy. Other people are seeing this and it's annoying.

#2: I bumped this over 10 times on the forum before it changed again, and no one wanted to help me. If I play any h.264 encoded video, the player crashes. If I don't press the dont send / send error button on the thing that pops up, I can still hear the audio play... but there is no video.

Athlon XP 2200+
nVidia GeForce 6600GT
1GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP2

Latest updates and drivers. Please help on this issue, I REALLY want to use this player, but obviously I can't if it can't play many of my video files correctly

--please stay polite-- i never have any problems for godsakes i can play iso's with vlc lol
with a 2200+ u should have enuf what ur process useage looking like when u try and play

I was polite before, it's just kind if pissing me off now considering how many times I posted this and no one has really acknowledged the problem

My CPU usage stays about the same, VLC doesn't significantly go up.

Other programs play h.264 video fine using the ffdshow codec for me, just an FYI.

About the mkv file:
Mkv is just a container. You can put loads of codec in it. Check which codec are in your file and if they are supported in VLC.

That was the first thing I checked.

The video is definately supported; various versions of DivX (5.xx). Those are the ones that I have that play choppy. The other video files I have (which are also .mkv) are encoded with h.264, something that is supposed to be supported it 0.8.2, and this one crashes the player.

Well, guess this program isn't ever going to work correctly for me.

send the file then.. let's see.

I did this once before, and I got no response for a long time, and then it looks like they re-did the whole forums... my upload is too slow and too capped to keep sending ~231MB files. Besides, who am I supposed to send it to? Myself? The only hosting site that allows files that big that I know of (that doesn't require me to make an account) is megaupload.com, and that site drops the connection after maybe 20mb.

You can cut MKV file with tools like VirtualdubMOD, creating file sized like 2 megs. Use Video -> Directstream copy and File -> Save
then upload that small file to your webpage.

hey kwolf i have the same problem as u do i tried other players and none of them work the closest thing i got it to working was in media player classic but in that the audio was way off but u could atleast see the video lol

I have roughly the same problem using VLC. I get very choppy video with h.264 encoded media. My video will freeze every few moments... Perhaps every minuet or so, but the audio is flawless. If I play the file in MPC, I get good video with no chop, and the audio is usually off by just a slight ammount, but perhaps there's a setting in MPC to offset the audio (unknown, but irrelevant to the post). In VLC, if I pause/play the video, usually (about 70% of the time) the video will pick right back up, and all will be well again until the next time it chops up, but the other 30% of the time I have to repeatedly press pause/play to get the video to come back.

I've been testing this with the same result on two of my systems. One is a 3200+ w/GeForce3 and 2 gig of ram running XPsp2 fully updated using the Gordian Knot Codec Pack 1.9. The other system is a Phenom 9500 w/GeForce 8600 GT and 4 gig of ram running Vista Bis 32bit fully updated using Cole2k Codec Pack (advanced) 6.0.9 (in programs and features I see X264 H.264/AVC Video Codec installed, so that's probably what that pack uses...)

I don't remember all of the codecs selected when installing the GK pack on the XP machine, but I'm no minimalist when it comes to codecs, so I'd have selected pretty much all of them, however, I assumed in the begining that it might be the GF3 that was at fault. Also, I think I downloaded an h.264 codec from afreecodec onto that machine to try to fix this problem when I first noticed it, which is when I first started using VLC, and cooincidentally playing h.264 encoded videos (does anyone see the trend?). On the machine with a Phenom, I downloaded Cole2k because it had all of the MythTV filters, and as I have a MythTV setup in my livingroom, I thought it would be nice to have the ability to use virtualdubmod on the NUV files it outputs when I want to...

I hope all of this information wasn't given in vain, and someone out there listening has a method for fixing our problems, however, at this point, with the difference in the machines I've tested it on (a few other setups of friends; people I see playing high end games, who must have nice systems, on top of my own results), I'd have to say there's some issue with VLC. I would by no means consider myself an expert on video encoding/decoding, however, I do have some experience in general troubleshooting, and since I'm not seeing the same problems on the same systems with MPC and other players on some of the systems that aren't mine, then whatever the problem is, weather it's how it's handling the codec, or some problem with the player itself, it must be coming from VLC.

First, don't bump up old threads like this, you can start a new thread if last post is like year old. Second, VLC can't use any external decoders so installing codec packs don't help VLC. Third, you can get some speed boost to H.264 decoding by setting skip loop filter to all.

First, *Slap* for trying to tell me how to post. I found this thread via google, and created an account here specifically to reply to it, because otherwise, I'm just some guy out there having this problem independantly of anyone else (and everyone else can jump in saying they aren't having this issue), but replying here is confirmation of someone elses problem; and perhaps now that I have an account, I'll post a new thread on it also...

Second (in response to your third, and more importantly; back to the issue at hand) setting it to skip the loop filter reduces the quality of the output, and as I have a computer that should be fast enough to decode 720p/1080i/1080p H.264 video without comromising video quality (as shown in MPC, and by the fact that my CPU/Mem utilization is low during playback in VLC) why would I want to do that? Is there another way around the choppiness without sacraficing quality?

On a side note, I did try skipping the loop filter for H.264, and it does reduce any chop, but in side-by-side comparisons with MPC, it does seem to look of less quality.

What VLC Version are you using?

You can't change the decoder VLC uses to decode h.264 material so there is nothing else you can do what comes to VLC, you can use haali + coreavc with some other media player if you want better playback. I told you about posting because last post to this thread was over 2 years ago, things do change over time.

PROBLEM SOLVED

at least for me, take mkv file and make into dvd (vob) files with vso convertx to dvd. than either watch on pc with video lan, or use hdmi wire to tv and this will at least keep it at relatively close to 1080i, or 1080p dependant on your tv capabilities.