Playback of h264 mov very sluggish

[wheatln2]

Hey everyone,
So I am making a video sequence in FCP5 which is for viewing across 3 monitors using a TripleHead2Go. Anyway, of more relevance to here is that I can't get it to play smoothly.

The clip is playing fine when rendered in FCP, but when exported it appears to have the playback speed of a clip running at 10fps or so. I have exported using quicktime conversion H264 codec, running at a set size of 2160x405 and at a set framerate of 25fps (i tried exporting using current settings and no difference).

Anyway, the clip is being played back on a 2Gig Mac Pro, and has been tested to the same effect on a Dell Precisiion M65 running 2Gig RAM and a 2.16GHz processor. Any ideas on what is causing the sluggish playback, and it is perfectly uniform, which leads me to think it's not due to processing problems as this would surely cause it to stop and start more. Sound is playing fine. Is it a H264 problem? It's a public computer so I can't update the version of quicktime though it is version 7.1.5 which I think is the latest.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated....

[jman98]

Are you sure about that resolution of 2160x405? That's crazy. That's like 5:1. Anyway, perhaps it is a video card issue. I can't playback H.264/X.264 very well on my best PC, which is now almost 3 years old. My video card is on the motherboard and it's not even close to state of the art. I just ordered a new card that should improve playback, I hope. If you don't get any better answers, send me a private message around Thursday and I'll let you know if a better video card fixed my problem. I have 2 GB of RAM and an AMD 3200+ CPU which should be enough, but I bought a film from Jaman.com which is 720x480 H.264 encoded with QuickTime and my playback was poor. This is just standard resolution stuff. My CPU should be able to handle it fine. I am sure it must be onboard video card, which only has 64 MB of memory and isn't very fast. You might have a similar problem with a PC as old as your Dell. Again, PM me around Thursday if you want as I should have the card by then and I'll let you know if that fixed my problem.

[wheatln2]

Are you sure about that resolution of 2160x405? That's crazy. That's like 5:1. Anyway, perhaps it is a video card issue. I can't playback H.264/X.264 very well on my best PC, which is now almost 3 years old. My video card is on the motherboard and it's not even close to state of the art. I just ordered a new card that should improve playback, I hope. If you don't get any better answers, send me a private message around Thursday and I'll let you know if a better video card fixed my problem. I have 2 GB of RAM and an AMD 3200+ CPU which should be enough, but I bought a film from Jaman.com which is 720x480 H.264 encoded with QuickTime and my playback was poor. This is just standard resolution stuff. My CPU should be able to handle it fine. I am sure it must be onboard video card, which only has 64 MB of memory and isn't very fast. You might have a similar problem with a PC as old as your Dell. Again, PM me around Thursday if you want as I should have the card by then and I'll let you know if that fixed my problem.

Indeed it is almost 5:1! It's basically 3 16:9 streams stuck together, which is strange!

The lapttop is only 2 months old and has Vista and all the latest drivers, and the fact that the video plays the exact same on a very powerful Mac Pro, suggests its something to do with FCP's output...

[edDV]

H.264 usually requires hardware support from the display card to play at full resolution. The top end ATI x1900 cards with a healthy CPU can barely handle 1920x1080 h.264.

Software players use down res tricks to play full speed at the expense of resolution.

If this is a Kiosk type application, you need to use a less compressed format like MPeg2 and/or drop resolution to 720p.

[wheatln2]

H.264 usually requires hardware support from the display card to play at full resolution. The top end ATI x1900 cards with a healthy CPU can barely handle 1920x1080 h.264.

Software players use down res tricks to play full speed at the expense of resolution.

If this is a Kiosk type application, you need to use a less compressed format like MPeg2 and/or drop resolution to 720p.

Thanks edDV. The thing that is baffling me is the fact that Quicktime loads and plays clips from here (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/ - right up to 1080p) and plays them back just fine. However when I get it to play back the exported FCP H264 clip, it jitters and moves at a regular slow speed or something like 8 or 10fps...