Newest version (.8.6d) & 264 videos

[raptoreb]

Hello,
First off, I've been a long time user of VLC and have always loved it. Thanks to the developers for their effort involved with a project like this.
I just updated to .8.6d from 6c and I'm trying to play an hd movie. (The Matrix 1080p, .mkv container, 264 codec, ) on my WinXP Intel 3.8ghz single processor (hyperthreading on) with 2 gigs of ram. Never had trouble playing 264 vids before, the same video plays fine in MediaPlayer Classic. I tried what someone mentioned for a similar but different issue (Preferences > Input Codecs > Other Codecs > FFMpeg > Advanced Options > Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding > set to all.) The video is very 'laggy' at times and stalls out leaving just audio playing till it catches up with itself.

[CloudStalker]

What's the CPU usage? While there are no other applications running, except for VLC and the video that you're trying to play, press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and select the Performance tab.

[raptoreb]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I killed all programs except the usual background processes in windows and played. It ran better averaging 30%-50% CPU usage. It still 'hung up' on parts... seems to not like the sections where everything is in 'code' and green in the matrix which I imagine would be harder on the codec. At that instance it was up at 52%.

[CloudStalker]

OK, just a few run by things to check for:

• Latest video card drivers for your graphics card
• Latest DirectX drivers from Microsoft
• Setting the video output module within VLC to "DirectX video output" (save and restart player)

You can also go into Preferences -> Video and disable "Skip frames", save and restart VLC.

[raptoreb]

I did all that, and it's still giving me a problem. I've been testing VLC with this video about 6 minutes in. Trinity escapes through the phonebooth, a few words, and then the camera zooms into the phone, lots of green code/complex screen then the word search comes up, some white flare and then it pans out from Neo's monitor. Plays perfectly fine in Media Player Classic, freezes and then chokes as it catches up with itself.

[CloudStalker]

Weird. What if you reset the Preferences and Cache within VLC and try again? maybe there are some settings made that are causing this problem.

[raptoreb]

Resetting everything made it worse. Reenabled the "disable loop filter for h264" setting (paraphrasing here) Better but still no go at that one spot. Went to http://x264.nl and downloaded the latest FFshow package, didn't help. Copied/renamed the file from the new package (x264.dll to libx264_plugin.dll) and replaced the one in vlcs install folder, no good on that either.

[raptoreb]

Anyone else have a 1080p H264 mkv file with a particularly complexed scene they wanna throw at VLC for shits and giggles?

[raptoreb]

I installed .8.6c to see if that could handle this section of video, but no luck, it hung up too.

[CloudStalker]

It almost seems like the contributers here at VideoLAN are all waiting to say this but downloading external codecs and codec packs have no effect on VLC since it uses its own built-in codec library. OK one last thing that I could suggest for the moment is possibly upload a small sample from where the video is having problems. Hmm...there aren't any legal ramifications for doing this are there? Well until someone else can confirm this it's probably best that you hold off for now.

If the OK is given then you may yield the best results as someone else is able to reproduce this problem on their own computer and come up with a solution from there. Sorry that I couldn't help any further but CloudStalker is tiered, it's kinda late.

[raptoreb]

Thanks for all your help, and I know external codec downloads don't help, but in this case i replaced the included VLC driver .dll file for x264 with the one downloaded from the x264.nl website. Uploading a clip of a movie should be fully covered under fair use (or what's left of fair use.) Now I have to figure out the best way to cut apart the video file without modifying/reencoding anything.

[VLC_help]

What codec you use in Media Player Classic to decode the video (CoreAVC or FFDshow)?
I am quite sure that current FFMPEG in VLC just don't have enough optimizations to decode the video properly and there is nothing you can do about, until VLC gets update or you try nightly builds.
Also x264 is for encoding only, not for decoding, so updating any x264 files doesn't help at all.

[raptoreb]

Media Player Classic is using CoreAVC. VLC had these video issues once in a while on certain parts of the movie but was fine other then that, but watching it in Media Player Classic... it was much better with the video but would occasionally lose sync with the audio.

[VLC_help]

CoreAVC is ATM the best H.264 decoder for Windows, so please don't compare VLC's decoding to it =)

[raptoreb]

well for the record, VLC did well for the most part and slightly faltered on some of the exceedingly complex scenes. VLC outshined CoreAVC in regards to the audio getting out of sync with the movie. The funny thing is, my little Tvix media box handled 1080P H265 mkv files better then my computer did which greatly surprised me. (3.8ghz Pentium 4 w/ 2gigs ram).

[VLC_help]

CoreAVC only decodes video, so it shouldn't cause audio issues. And what comes to DSP stuff, most operating systems with pure x86 CPU (so no SIMD optimizations used in software) are just SO slow with DSP stuff. So anything optimized for the job, will whack x86 stuff.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/25807/97/
what Toshiba used for first HD DVD players =) Now they use some decoder chips and some low frequency ARM chips IIRC.

[longhairedweirdo]

Well, let me throw out one last question about this, just in case it matters. What were you playing the video from? Was it on the hard drive, a USB drive, or from a CD/DVD?

You say processor was below 70% (the magic number for most performance issues - 70% sustained *generally* means you'll benefit from a boost in CPU power), and I'm guessing with two gigs of memory, there wasn't a problem there, so my next best guess for a bottleneck is the IO system.