HD Video Clips

Hi, I took some video clips recently on a HD Samsung camera and they seemed fine when I took them, but now when I play them back they seem to jump and freeze etc; I have tried another PC with the same result.

It is possible I have damaged them in some way by switching between Media Player and Media Player Classic? Also, can I downgrade them to non-HD?

Thanks - Blue

Sounds like your pc's are not handling them. CPU's are too weak etc. Is any of your pc's a dual core?. If you try playing one of them again and open task manager at same time. Go to performance tab and see if the CPU usage is 100% or almost 100%. If it is non stop then your pc's may not be powerful enough.

Hi BM8, just checked the usage and its 60% but the line is squarewaved in the Task Manager.

I am running a Centrino Duo on a laptop with 3Gb of memory - maybe try a quadcore or similar!!!

Thanks - Blue

Edit: Running XP Pro

Edited by deleted (Sun 22-Nov-09 18:15:30)

I would have thought a Centrino would be powerful enough. Unless it's the graphics accelerator "GPU" being too slow. One thing you could try is VLC media player. It plays almost anything with its own codecs.

http://www.videolan.org/

If you do try vlc when you install it untick the boxes during install where it asks you if you want to associate it with media files. Or it may make itself your default media player. Altho if it did you can always change that back quite easily.

Doesn't Task Manager's Performance Manager thingy report 50% utilisation if one of two cores is fully utilised?

Typical applications and typical codecs don't really know how to use multiple cores (some might, many won't). So the 60% CPU utilisation may mean that one core is fully loaded doing the decoding and the other one is doing a bit of other stuff.

IE decoding this video with Media Player Classic and associated codecs and your current settings is probably too much for the available compute power. Usually there's a slider somewhere that allows you to specify how much video decoding can be left to the GPU (ie how much hardware acceleration to use); you need to make sure the software isn't doing all the decoding.

Not much point trying a quad core unless an individual core is faster than the individual cores you're using at the moment. Faster isn't always about MHz either. IE it's worth a try but not because it's a quad core, just because it's different

I'd maybe suggest trying lower monitor resolutions and seeing what other stuff is configurable in MPC (or even in WMP) but that may not be too helpful given that this is an HD video. If you can display at the same resolution the video was recorded at, that may cut out some work for the CPU or GPU.

It's very unlikely that switching from WMP to MPC will have damaged the actual video file.

There are ways and means of downconverting your original HD source to a lower quality (perhaps less demanding) format but I'll leave those suggestions to others.

I'm all a little confused how to test this out now. I find it difficult to believe my Duo Core can't cope with the file.

I'll wait to see if I can convert it to a lower resolution and see if that makes a difference.

Thank all - Blue

Trying vlc player would rule out any codec issues. How big are these hd files?
I would have thought a core 2 duo could handle them too.

Hi, tried VLC with the same results and the files are between 80 to 150Mb.

HTH - Blue

80 to 150mb.. unless there like 20 seconds long or shorter i cant imagine them pushing your cpu too hard. I've played. I think your issue is something else other than lack of cpu power.

I'll put them on flash drive and maybe have a go on a powerful desktop just to rule that out and if its the same, I guess they are ruined.

Thanks for all your help - Blue

I can't see you'd have runied them - if you haven't edited them

It really sounds like something isn't able to cope with the processing/bandwidth HD requires - it could be the harddisk disk or even the video system (or even a driver issue) - I have had problems playing HD in full screen mode, yet it plays OK on a reduced window

edit: actually I think it might have been the otherway round - at full screen only using 9% of cpu but in window seeing 40% on a i7 cpu

Edited by Kenneth (Sun 22-Nov-09 22:07:33)

see this http://www.shivaranjan.com/2006/09/09/is-your-pc-cap...

Are you thinking of viewing High Definition (HD) video in your PC? If yes here is the minimum system requirements for playing HD video using Cyberlink HD Video playback software ( I guess most of us won�t be able to meet it):
Processor (CPU):

* Intel Pentium EE 840 (3.2 GHz)
* Intel Pentium EE 955 (3.4 GHz)
* Intel Pentium D 9xx series 945 (3.4 GHz), 950 (3.4 GHz), 960 (3.6 GHz)
* Intel Core Duo T2xxx series T2500 (2 GHz), T2600 (2.16 GHz), T2700 (2.33 GHz)
* Intel Core 2 Duo E6xxx series E6300 (1.8 GHz), E6400 (2.13 GHz), E6600 (2.4 GHz), E6700 (2.66 GHz), E6800 (2.93 GHz)
* AMD Athlon 64 FX series FX-60 (2.6 GHz), FX-62 (2.8 GHz)
* AMD Athlon 64 X2 series 4200+ (2.2 GHz), 4400+ (2.2 GHz), 4600+ (2.4 GHz), 4800+ (2.4 GHz), 5000+ (2.6 GHz)
* AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (2 GHz)

Note: All the above CPU�s are Dual Core.
Even my Dual core Pentium D 930 @ 3.0Ghz is not enough.
System Memory (RAM):
512 MB or above, 1 GB is recommended

Disc Drive:
Blu-ray Disc drive or HD DVD drive

Graphics Card:
NVidia GeForce: 7600 GT, 7800 GTX 512, 7900 GX2, 7900 GTX, 7950 GX2
ATi: X1600 series, X1800 series, X1900 series
(Again I fail this condition as am currently on onboard graphics powered by Intel 945G chipset)

Video RAM:
256 MB graphics card memory or above

Display Devices:
1. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) compliant display (DVI, HDMI connections) for digital output.
2. TV (composite, componet, S-Video) or computer monitor (VGA) for analog output


Cyberlink even offers a tool which will check your system for compatibilty and will give a report:

Note that those specs relate to playback of BluRay or HD DVD. What video format does an HD camcorder use (H.264 maybe)? What resolution (camcorder? monitor?) are we using here?

Are these camcorder specs the same video formats (codecs) and resolutions as BluRay or HD-DVD?

Also note the requirement for a half decent (not integrated) graphics card, which may or may not be present on a laptop.

We haven't yet been told what graphics is in the OP's laptop, nor do we know exactly what CPU it has.

Lets go back to basics -- Try updating graphics card driver to latest. Try getting all windows updates and downloading latest windows media player (as this will likely contain updated codecs)

Let me gather all the info required, update all the necessaries and I'll report back when all is complete.

I'm finding this quite interesting

Blue

All done: so a recap: -

Laptop Esprimo M9400 with XP Pro, 80Gb HDD; 3Gb DDR2 Memory; Centrino Duo CPU T7250 2.0Ghz; Intel Mobile 965 Express Chipset and finally, Windows Media Player 11 with K-Lite codec pack full installed; all updates are installed and active.

Won't play HD video clips of between 80 / 100Mb without jumping, freezing or blocking.

HTH - Blue

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Nov-09 09:27:41)

Thanks for the nearly complete update.

The resolutions (in pixels) of the HD video and your current display adapter settings are still unspecified...

Not sure I understand this question, but the video was shot in 1080P or on the high res as the camera would allow on an 8Gb SDHC card, using a new Samsung Bullet style camcorder.

And I think you mean 1280x800 on my laptop

Blue

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Nov-09 14:54:19)

In reply to a post by BlueHuman:

Not sure I understand this question, but the video was shot in 1080P or on the high res as the camera would allow on an 8Gb SDHC card, using a new Samsung Bullet style camcorder.

And I think you mean 1280x800 on my laptop

Thanks, that'll do nicely.

You should probably follow the earlier advice about ensuring graphics drivers etc are up to date.

The 1080p probably translates to 1920x1080 in PC graphics terms.

You'll note this isn't the same as the 1280x800 on the laptop.

So either something has to rescale every frame before displaying it (a non trivial task), or the PC display has to change resolution so the HD video doesn't need rescaling.

Rescaling every frame in real time can be done either by a decent CPU or by a decent GPU. It's quite a lot of work and *may* be more than a laptop CPU or GPU can cope with (lots of variables here so a definitive should/shouldn't is tricky). On the other hand it isn't exactly bleeding edge either, a decent CPU/GPU combination should cope fine.

Anyway, as you seem to be maxed out on one core, it sounds like the CPU is being asked to do more than it is capable of doing. Make sure the GPU is doing as much as it can (the "hardware acceleration" slider mentioned earlier).

Or avoid the rescaling altogether by changing PC display resolution. You probably won't get the required resolution on your laptop's built in screen but if your laptop will support a 2nd monitor (is it an Intel Graphics Mobile Accelerator 4500?) you could see if it works with that set to 1920x1080.

Can you try playing the stuff back on a latest greatest PC with decent graphics (not some Intel integrated stuff)?

You could also try a video editing tool of some flavour to reduce the resolution of the files to something you PC can directly display without rescaling, and see how that goes.

Your files *should* still be intact; displaying them in WMP or MPC should not cause permanent problems like this. Can the camera play them back to prove this?

What a great post, thank you - unfortunately the camera has gone back so I cannot check that out but I will find a super PC in the near future and see what occurs.

Thanks again, Blue

If you have a couple of minutes at home, see what you can do with your laptop.

I've just had a quick tinker on my AMD laptop (HP/Compaq 6715b Turion x2, whatever that means) and I can set the built in display resolution to 1920 by 1080 (and more, much more ). It can't display all of it at once, but I can move around it.

Whether that is a realistic enough 1920 by 1080 to avoid the rescaling I really don't know, and I don't have any HD source material, but it should be dead easy to try something similar on yours:
controlpanel->display->settings and see what's available on the Screen Resolution slider

The "hardware acceleration" slider is around there too:
display->settings->advanced->troubleshoot and you should see it.
If it's not set to full, try it on full. In fact why not try all the settings!

Note that if "hardware acceleration" wasn't set to "full", there may have been a good reason for it (eg some misbehaviour on the GPU sometimes), so even if "full" works for HD playback, you may want to return it to the old setting when not using HD playback.

I'm not sure it's 100% relevant but you might want to have a look at
http://download.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/intelg...
and see if anything is applicable to your setup.

Note that with laptops it's not unheard of for vendors to build in their own driver rather than the Intel one (or in my case, the AMD one). If this is the case AND you don't mind tinkering AND you have a decent backup (or trust XP to do one for you) you could try replacing the Fujitsu driver with the Intel one found from
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/detect.htm
No guarantees though.

According to http://www.intel.com/assets/pdf/datasheet/316273.pdf your chipset with the Intel driver should support more than enough resolution for HD and should do hardware-accelerated scaling (bottom of p14). The chip itself should also do HDTV to a TV connector if Fujitsu have provided one (HDMI etc).

You might also want to check that your DirectX is reasonably up to date and sensibly configured
start->run->dxdiag (no I'm not going to explain it, t'Internerd has the answers).

I think Intel say your chipset should support DX10 but that's Vista and later so you should see DX9.

Loads more info

Thanks again, Blue

Edited by deleted (Tue 24-Nov-09 16:51:05)

personally i would suggest removing k-lite codec pack for a start, its a collection of old and unlicenced codecs. ffdshowtryout and mpc-hc will do anything k-lite can but better, i would guess your videos are avchd (xxxx.mts) since thats what most consumer cameras use, you want to use a multithreaded decoder (maybe even a decoder that offloads to your gpu) the mpc decoder can do both and is free but its limited in what gpu's it can use for dxva