VLC starts playback with sound before video catches up

[Wizardling]

Always happens on my mid-2007 24" 2.8GHz iMac with 4GB RAM and plenty of free HD space. Doesn't matter if I close Firefox and make sure .Mac syncing and no TM backup is occurring (boy are they a CPU drain and bad software). It is at least a few seconds before video appears all blocky and fuzzy and a few more till that clears up and I get a good picture. Happens with all types of video formats that I've tried since I got this Mac in 2007. Then again the same happens in QT Player (if immediate playback is enabled). I just wish VLC being third party would acknowledge the absurdity of this fast a Mac being unable to manage instant playback of video. Certainly Apple never will

So what I really would like is a setting to turn instant playback off. I can't see anything like that, but am I missing something?

[snix]

yes, you might be missing something, because i have both an imac and macbook pro that are both slower than yours with less ram and i experience no such problems. and what does closing firefox have anything to do with vlc? your imac is probably having video card issues if the same problem is occuring in quicktime player.

[Wizardling]

Because Firefox uses a fair bit of CPU depending on the number of tabs and flash (ugg) content.

A problem with my video card? How do you figure that? I play games like WoW and Quake 3 ok. It's just that video takes a while to show in apps that try to play it back instantly.

[snix]

like i said, if you're experiencing the same problem in both vlc and quicktime or anything video related, it's a problem isolated to your mac. it's not a vlc issue.

btw, i can watch a hd youtube video with flash 10 in firefox 3.5 and start playing a 720p mkv video in vlc just fine. the avg load on both my cpu cores is about 85% however.

[Wizardling]

Oh I get that it's not a VLC issue - that was just bitching on my part. Like I say what I really need is to be able to turn off instant playback.

[snix]

not sure what you mean by instant playback. if you start playing the video, why wouldn't you want it to start instantly?

[Wizardling]

not sure what you mean by instant playback. if you start playing the video, why wouldn't you want it to start instantly?

Because unfortunately none of the three 24" iMacs I've had can manage that. I'd like the video just to open as I can in QT Player, but not start playing. So I can wait a few seconds while the HD whirs and VM is shuffled about and then start playback.

BTW - do Flash videos in your browser play perfectly? Like no minor hiccups with the video? Because I've not managed that with Flash video on any of the dozen Macs I've used in the past few years with Flash video (e.g. stuff on You Tube). Flash has to be some of the worst software ever made when it's run on platforms other than Windows.

[snix]

it sounds like something is funky with your system(s) because what you're describing is abnormal. maybe your hdd's are spinning down too frequently, but even then it should only be a couple seconds til they're at full speed and the video starts playing. you might want to increase the spindown duration if that's the case. constant spindown/spinup is bad for hdd's anyways. you're better off letting them spin until they go idle for an hour or more.

re flash videos, 90% of the time they play fine. i get the occasionally stutter when video is downloading as it's playing since that tends to utilize more cpu. but i agree, generally speaking the flash container is crap.