Problem with WMV replay, erratic fast seek, what's the cause?

[J-E-T-S]

Hello,

I searched for a good twenty minutes but couldn't find anything close to my problem. Whenever I would play a wmv file, the file would play at a normal speed, but when I click on anywhere on the slider (I use media player classic), the file moves there and plays VERY FAST for a few seconds before the speed returns to normal. I am baffled by this odd behavior. I have the codecs but am wondering if it's a settings issue or what not.

Please let there be someone who knows how to fix this. It's driving me crazy.

[jagabo]

In high compression codecs like WMV3 there will typically be a keyframe (an entire picture) followed by hundreds of frames that only encode the difference between successive frames. When you move the seek bar and stop on some random frame the decoder has to seek to the prior keyframe then decode every intermediate frame to reconstruct the frame you requested. The player may flip through all those intermediate frames very quickly, like you are seeing, until it has reached the requested frame. The alternative would be to simply show nothing until the requested frame has been decoded. Also some players have an option to only seek to keyframes to avoid these behaviors.

[J-E-T-S]

In high compression codecs like WMV3 there will typically be a keyframe (an entire picture) followed by hundreds of frames that only encode the difference between successive frames. When you move the seek bar and stop on some random frame the decoder has to seek to the prior keyframe then decode every intermediate frame to reconstruct the frame you requested. The player may flip through all those intermediate frames very quickly, like you are seeing, until it has reached the requested frame. The alternative would be to simply show nothing until the requested frame has been decoded. Also some players have an option to only seek to keyframes to avoid these behaviors.

Well, that is odd. The same wmv file had no seek problem when I was playing it on a celeron system running Windows XP 32 bit, but that file has the seek problem when I play it on an XP 64 bit running a quad core system.

[jagabo]

Different players do different things. And some players have "fast seek" options where they only seek to keyframes.