live mpeg 4 stream appears to stutter

[Ultraseamus]

I am using vlc to display an MPEG 4 live video stream. My problem is that the video appears to slow down, speed up, and possibly skip a block of frames every so often. In-between these errors, the feed looks fine. I am wondering which of the many settings would have a chance at smoothing out the feed. Even if we had to trail behind the stream by a couple of seconds, it would be worth it to have a more consistent output. Right now it seems that the frame rate just varies too much, it will slow down or speed up often. There are a lot of settings in the VLC GUI to deal with this, but I am having issues figuring out how all of them work. Most seem to have no effect at all. If anyone could point me to a guide on those settings, or a better place to ask this question, it would also help.

I know that I can get the stream to look perfect by buffering a large number of frames, and displaying them at my own speed. But this quickly goes out of sync. I tried to be smart about slowly varying the bitrate to stay on track with no under/overflows, but in the end decided that VLC would be able to do it better than I could ever figure out. I think this is still the case, but the options are vast. I figure if I can get it looking right in the GUI, I can alter my command line settings to match through my code. I am using VLC media player 9.8a Grishenko on a windows OS.

it seems like the rate control buffer should be exactly what I am looking for. But, no matter how drastic of changes I make to any of these settings, it has no effect at all.

Thanks.

My settings:

Code: Select all

"-vvvvv", "--plugin-path", "plugins", "--ignore-config", "--noaudio", "--overlay", "--no-osd", "--vout", "directx", "--width", "900", "--height", "900", "--video-x", "502", "--video-y", "152", "--no-video-deco", "--video-title", "directxVLC", "--video-on-top",