Playing and transcoding high bitrate h264 TS files

[jcrhunter]

I got a copy of the teaser to a BBC HD show, but its bitrate (20,000 kbit/s) is too much for my G5 Quad 2.5 GHz. VLC 0.8.5 just gives a grey screen and VLC 0.8.6 gives me about 1 second of good video before stopping with a still frame while the audio continues underneath. MPlayer OS X 1.0pre8 is probably the best player as it plays the whole file with continuous video, but with so many skipped frames as to be unusable.

No problem, I thought - I'll just use ffmegX to transcode the video down to 10,000 kbit/s and I'll be fine. Unfortunately, while ffmegX will happily transcode the video down to a playable bitrate, all it gives is a highly distorted video with only the occasional recognizable frame or two. I tried previewing the original file using "Play" in ffmegX's main window to bring up mplayer and just got the same distorted video so it appears that the problem is in properly recognizing the TS file's original codec and not in my transcode attempts.

ffmegX sees the file as h264, yuv420p, 1440x1080 - I don't know about the yuv420p part, but h264 and 1440x1080 are correct.

So, does anybody have any experience transcoding (or even just playing) these high bitrate BBC HD files? Who knew a Quad G5 2.5 GHz would be too slow to play a video file?

Thanks.

[Garp]

link for file mentioned?

[caozinho]

I don't think your quad is too slow for handling this file.
I've played around with some HD MPEG2 TS and H.264 TS recently and got mixed results using different versions of VLC.
The 0.9.0 nightly build from 10/06/2006 plays the H.264 (1920x1080i) streams perfectly on my G5 2GHz Dual. Reading through the VLC change log it seems the x264 coded built into VLC at the moment is everything but optimized for performance.

C.