mov video jerky at 1280x720?

[mhoople]

I am trying to watch a .mov video from my Canon sd780 camera.
Resolution
1280 x 720
Aspect ratio
1.77778
Format
H264
Bitrate
22002 kbps
Frames per second
30.000
Selected codec
ffh264
The playback is always jerky when playting this type of file when it is best quality. When it's lower quality smplayer plays it withou the jerkiness. I read something about increasing the cache. I did that but nothing changed. Any other tips? Thanks

[redxii]

What are your computer specs? You can try increasing the 'Threads for decoding' in Performance settings, but that will only be effective if your CPU is multi-core.

[mhoople]

[redxii]

You should be able to set "Threads for decoding" in Performance to 2. Set to 2 and report back.

[MacTheKnife]

In addition to setting the threads to "2", also make certain that the "loop filter" setting (which is on the same preferences page as the thread count) is set to either "skip only on HD video" or "skip always".

[mhoople]

[mhoople]

I thought those preference adjustment had fixed it. Unfortunately the tiny pause every second or so is back at 1280x720. I am able to view it without the jerkiness on vlc player but I prefer smplayer.

[MacTheKnife]

If you could post screen caps of all your settings it might help us see if something looks strange about your settings.

Anyway, you might try the following to attempt to narrow down the problem:

Try turning off "Audio/Video auto synchronization" to see if it's related to syncing the audio. If the pauses go any but the audio goes out of sync then I'd suggest trying the transcoding steps that I mention at the end of this post. If you do the transcoding properly it can sometimes fix audio sync issues.

Try turning off "Allow frame dropping" if it wasn't related to the audio sync and if stopping the frame dropping helps then it's probably too doing more video processing than it needs to do for 720p. So I'd look to see if deinterlacing is turned on (which obviously isn't needed for 720p) or if so other video filters are turned on. So check to see if "Enable Post Processing by default" is disabled.

Also make sure that "Direct Rendering" is enabled. And you might want to play around with the "Draw video by slices" and "Double Buffering" settings to see if they have any effect.

Another thing to consider is to try transcoding the file into another container. I'm not sure how well mplayer handles .mov containers. So as a first step, I'd try just changing the container to .mkv without transcoding the audio or video. If that doesn't help, I'd try transcoding the video to mp4 in an mkv container to see if it's something about the H264 encoding that your camera is producing that mplayer doesn't like.

I've sometime found that transcoding a file with mencoder and making sure that it "timestamps every frame" helps with issues like this. But IIRC, mencoder doesn't ship with mplayer anymore and I'm not sure how to do the equivalent in other transcoders like ffmpeg.

[mhoople]

[mhoople]

I tried them all but no success. Actually I've quit using the higher resolution for now so I'll be back in touch to pursue this further if I start using it again.Thanks for the tips.