Choppy H.264 MP4 playback with VLC

[doniel]

Whenever I try to play back an H.264 MP4 video, it's more like a series of still photos than a motion picture. (There are no audio problems.) It occurred to me that perhaps WinXP Pro and all my startup programs and my open windows were demanding too many resources, not leaving enough for satisfactory playback. When I booted up a second installation of WinXP in which I still haven't installed my host of startup programs, and opened no programs other than VLC, playback was much better, but the video still froze fairly frequently for a few or more seconds at a time.

My computer isn't exactly state of the art (Pentium 3, 1 Ghz, 768MB RAM, video card with 32MB of RAM), and I'm wondering if the hardware requirements for smooth H.264 MP4 playback exceed what I have.

If not, what else could be causing my problem?

[anonymez]

and I'm wondering if the hardware requirements for smooth H.264 MP4 playback exceed what I have.

most likely. AVC playback requirements increase with resolution and features. while VLC/libavcodec performance has improved in the last few months, you might like to take a look at coreAVC (commercial), that way you may have a hope of playing dvd res content

imo it would be far better to upgrade

[doniel]

Thanks

I'll give CoreAVC a shot. If that doesn't work, well, I've been kind of looking for an excuse to upgrade anyway . . .

Thanks for your help.

[NightTran]

try nero to play?

[doniel]

CoreAVC is a relatively cheap solution to try. Nero, however, is too expensive to take a chance that it may do the trick.

True, upgrading my hardware would cost even more, but I'll get a lot more bang for the buck.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[doniel]

Installed CoreAVC (and CoreAAC). Win Media Player 10 didn't recognize the file extension (MP4), but I told it to try playing it anyway. It then displayed a message that it can't play the file because it doesn't have or doesn't support the codec.

[NightTran]

nero 7 is forsure to play MP4

[anonymez]

It then displayed a message that it can't play the file because it doesn't have or doesn't support the codec.

download & install haali's media splitter

[celtic_druid]

Thought coreAVC included Haali's splitter?

[doniel]

My apologies for not responding earlier. I never received e-mail notification of any posts after my own last one.

CoreAVC does include Haali's splitter. Unfortunately, I didn't see a need to add what I thought was yet another unnecessary program to my system and unchecked its box during installation of CoreAVC. I went back and installed it, and the video appears to be playing beautifully now.

My thanks to all who replied and helped!

[asdf123]

Choppy Video with VLC on Windows XP

I was having choppy video in VLC and have no idea about the settings in the program.

Solved my problem by installing Codec K-Lite package. No clue about the setting in that, I just left the default values. Now everything plays perfectly.

[admin]

asdf123: It's a bit strange to bring back an old thread like this, but your answer is correct though.

To be more precise, ffdshow is the answer as to why H.264 plays better with the codec pack, so you don't even need to install the whole codec pack (and yes, ffdshow is easy to both uninstall and to disable support for each individual codec).

VLC is a great player that plays almost everything without having to install anything else, but the efficiency isn't always 100%.