How to get better performance when playing HD H.264

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

H.264 codecs are pretty CPU intensive and VLC can't use multi-cores to decode it yet.

So if your computer is dying when decoding 1080p samples from H264, do the following.

• Open the preferences
• Tick advanced in the lower right corner
• Go to "Input/Codec"
• Go to "other codecs" subcategory
• Go to "FFmpeg"
• Put the "skip-filter for H264" to all
• Restart VLC

DON'T ASK help about this on IRC or I may kill you

Edited on public intrest by MetalheadGautham:

to the guys complaining that C2Q Q6600 and AMD Phenom can't run HD H.264:

Only ONE CORE among their 4 cores is used. Their indivudual core power is quite average. You would have a better performance with a high power per core CPU like C2D E8400.

...Thats UNLTIL multicore support appears on H264 decoder

[CloudStalker]

DON'T ASK help about this on IRC or I will kill you

I'm asking on IRC right now.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

DON'T ASK help about this on IRC or I may kill you

I'm asking on IRC right now.

I don't care, I wasn't on IRC all day... SOme people have to work...

[Ux64]

Thank you!

This solved my problem with choppy h264 videos.

[Ux64]

I found higher bitrate H.264 videos which still won't run on with Q6600 CPU. ;( (One core maxes out)

But I'm sure problem is being solved.

[brass2themax]

I've had VLC lag out on H.264 quite often myself. It's decent when you change the settings like suggested above, but I still get better overall performance out of Media Player Classic with the 'proper' builds of ffdshow and even CAVC.

Things can only get better though, VLC is a great tool, lots of room for improvement.

[thresh]

we all hope this would be "fixed" once there's a slice-based decoding implementation available in ffmpeg.

[Ux64]

VLC lag out on H.264 quite often myself. It's decent.

Unfortunately it isn't. In case there is some heavy h.264 stuff coming in. Like direct Blu-ray / HD-DVD rip. -> 45 gigabytes of data for 1.5 hour of stuff. It got pretty hefty bitrate so it totally kills my Q6600 CPU. And everything turns to very slow slide show.

Those settings are barely adequate for ~4 Gbytes / 1.5 hour rips.

[revolunet]

welcome back to the 80's when we needed the most up-to-date computer to play a single video...

[Ux64]

welcome back to the 80's when we needed the most up-to-date computer to play a single video...

I knew I had problem with my old AMD 4500+ CPU... But now I got Q6600 and it's not enough either. ;(

Off topic babbling.

I remember time when it was better to convert JPG images to GIF images before showing. It took so long time to show JPG images. ~20-30 seconds / image. (At that moment most hard drives got something like 40 megabytes of space and 286 cpu was hot!)

Also often palette was better optimized with proper conversion.

After that came MP3 it was so heavy compression. At first compressing CD to MP3 took several days. And also most of comps didn't play mp3 files directly. So it was better to convert those to wav for playing. Which wasn't either too bright idea, because most of hard drives got something like 120 megabytes of space.

When DivX came, it was quite nice. My 450 MHz Pentium just barely decoded it in time. But yeah, since that though challenge for home comps have been video compression. It's nice to see what the challenge will be in future when we get 1000 more or even more. Now I got 1 terabyte of hard disk space and 4x 2400 MHz cores. But that's still not enough for pre-uncompression or realtime decoding with software which uses only one core. And having 4 gigabyte of memory won't help.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

We are working on it, but this is complex stuff.

[native]

Really appreciate this - solved a very confusing problem for me

Works a treat with 1080p movie I grabbed earlier that just would not play correctly..

You are a Champ , Thanks

[Ux64]

These are non-educated thoughts. Just a quick brainstorm without any deeper thoughts...

I wonder if it would be possible to allow longer buffering and if it would help pipelining decoding process? Even so that every core would work separately from different keyframe. Altough current video compressors place keyframes very sparsely. Having enough (?) memory would allow this kind of processing.

Did I get something wrong or does field decoding require also field compressed material? Or can any material easily be decoded with field decoding? Striping image in to different fields.

[Fichera]

This made it better - thanks - but strange - I tried it on a desktop and a laptop and the laptop not as big an improvement as the desktop (both about 4 yrs old). Any other H.264 Tips - specifically .MOV files

[James]

I found higher bitrate H.264 videos which still won't run on with Q6600 CPU.

[Ux64]

I found higher bitrate H.264 videos which still won't run on with Q6600 CPU.

Thanks for confirming that. Now there are at least two of us.

Videos that are about 4GB+ / hour won't run with Q6600 with VLC. Before VLC starts to support multithreading.

We're eagerly waiting for that to happen.

[darrencook]

Having the same issue, i have a 5GB file in 1080p and for the hell of me i cannot get it to play without the messages saying late frame pc too slow?..

I'm running a amd quad core 2.2ghz, 2gb ddr2 9600 ram, 8600GT gfx, i don't get how in hell it can be too slow?..

[Ux64]

I'm running a amd quad core 2.2ghz, 2gb ddr2 9600 ram, 8600GT gfx, i don't get how in hell it can be too slow?..

Welcome to the club!

[MysteryXXX]

Hi,
I've a question to that topic:
As far as I know, the vlc player uses the ffdshow decoder. If I try to play a 1080i video on the windows media player using the downloaded ffdshow decoder, there is no problem. But if I use the vlc player with its intern decoder to play the same video, it seems that my cpu (amd 3800+ x2) isn't fast enoug for that job.
Somekind of strange?

[joseph5]

As far as I know, the vlc player uses the ffdshow decoder.

No, it doesn't. It uses the same code base though.

[Ux64]

Does anyone have experience about format conversion. I mean that I could convert h264 stuff to MPEG2 if no great quality loss is being experienced.

Unfortunately VLC's conversion options are very limited.

[andre77]

Thanks it works on my desktop so far. I will try it on my laptop tonight.

Miami Office Space for lease
Garden Tools

[patch]

My graphics card has on board video decoding, does VideoLan support, or will it support this?
This post suggests it doesn't and isn't likely to in the foreseeable future viewtopic.php?f=14&t=44499&p=140451&hilit=Avivo#p140451

If so is not this increasingly going to be a problem for users with ATI® Avivo™ and NVIDIA® PureVideo™ and Intel Clear Video technology cards
I suspect it is a problem for me as it means I will have to find a new program to play my videos, which I'm not keen on doing.

BTW
The computer I'm trying to use as a HTPC a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD2600 XT AGP card in 2.6GHz Pentium 4 running Windows XP
The Graphics card has Avivo™ for which drivers are available under directX 10 / Windows Vista
The reason I posted here is I believe support of graphics hardware acceleration is a general problem.
If it is felt this is the wrong place perhaps a link to the correct place could be posted

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Give us the specs to decode with the graphic cards, and we might do it.
SInce AVIVO® and other CRAP® (PureVideo®) are not open source and don't provide any open access to it, it is a NO GO.

[penguincentral]

I'll try this in the morning. I have a H.264 (or maybe it's x.264 i forget) that uses the mkv container, and the performance is average.

Thanks for the tip.