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