H.294 playback issues

[trooper11]

I have several anime series that are done in H.294 avi and I know this format is alot more cpu intensive then your usual xvid, but I was wondering if there would be anyway to get smooth playback on a 1Ghz P3 with 512mb ram and a pci Nvidia FX 5200 video card.

I believe this is probably below the minimum specs for H.294 playback, but there has to be some way to squeek out playback. this is a pc that i use exclusively for playing back video on a tv, so I dont need it for anyhting else. Ive tried changing the resources applied to the player and shutting down non essential programs like anti virus, etc, but its still not enough.

ive tried using media player classic, zoom player, and vlc. for some reason, vlc always crashes when i try to play back the video, but the other two will play it, just with audio stuttering during playback.

these are .mkv type videos containing the h.294 video and i have installed the CCCP pack for codecs.

first of all, can anyone suggest how i get this video to play in VLC. secondly, is there another player i should try or any settings i need to check in a certain player that would allow for smooth playback?

[Megahurts]

I have a P3 1Ghz cpu and would like to experiment. Where can I download a h.294 video file?

Chas

[trooper11]

well what i have is all anime, i could send you a link to a torrent for an anime if you want

[celtic_druid]

It is h.264 and it is a standard like MPEG-2, ASP MPEG-4, etc. The files in question would have been encoded with x264. Why on earth they used an avi container though I don't know. Guess because they are used to encoding with VDub.

I definatly won't be updating the VfW anymore and it is already well behind the cli encoder. Hopefully that will stop people releasing x264 avi's. It might be too late for XviD/DivX, but it isn't for AVC/h.264.

Err wait, reading on I see .mkv, that is ok. So what was it at the start about avi's?

What version/build of VLC. Probably libavcodec and the matroska support is out of date.

Your best chance for playback would be mplayer. Try: http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/mplayer/mplayer2005.11.02.P3.7z

[trooper11]

yeah that avi comment was wrong, the video file contained in the mkv is .mp4 not avi.

how do i fix the vlc problem? i have the latest release, do i have to change soem setting for it to pick up the latest codec i have installed?

ill give mplayer a try

[celtic_druid]

By latest you mean a nightly build?
mkv is a container as is avi and mp4. An mkv contains neither although I think I get what you are saying. The mkv contains native AVC and not AVC stored in VfW compatibity mode. Native AVC demuxes to raw AVC, VfW demuxes to avi.

mplayer uses less resources than VLC in fact the only thing that would be more resource friendly would be mplayer under linux.

[trooper11]

well i dont have the latest beta, but the latest stable release.

the strange thing is that i use vlc all the time on my faster system (an athlon 64 3700+) and it doesnt crash when playing that type of file.

[trooper11]

are there any guides on how to use mplayer? i havent been able to get the video to play on it at all.

i wanted to list the info for the mkv file.

the video stream is of course mpeg 4/AVC

the audio stream is ogg vorbis

would it help if i pasted the info for the video and audio?

[Baldrick]

drag and drop the mkv on the mplayer.exe
or use a gui, http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer/gui/mplayer-gui-rtm-cvs-20051031.zip

[celtic_druid]

Also "f" toggles fulscreen. I just set fs in my conf file though so all files default to full screen, I really can't see the advantage of a GUI when it comes to playing video.