jerky playback of mpg

[dave1892]

Hi,

I've been struggling for a while now trying to fix some mpgs. I'm sure the answers are dotted around various video sites and tools, but I'm pretty new to videos and there are a huge number of options and ways of doing things, so, I was hoping you could help me.

The full story is, I have a Canon FS100. I took some videos on it, and used the utterly useless Imagemaker3 SE to transfer them to my PC (and rename them from .MOD to .MPG) in the process. Now imagemaker can play them fine (that actually puzzles me a lot - it's obviously using the right settings)

Playing the mpgs it has produced in WMP gives very jerky playback. My goal is to have a simple method to fix all video that comes from the FS100 to produce mpgs that I can give to people to play in WMP. First off, my PC is high spec - E8500 with 3GB RAM, windows XP, and I never have performance problems with it.

So, I have tried - first off I tried SDCopy (setting the wide flag since it's all filmed widescreen) That produced mpgs which had the identical problem in WMP. I then tried Avidemux. This plays the mpgs fairly well, although it plays them in 4:3 format, and I can't see how to change that. I tried saving the mpg, and what it produces doesn't play in WMP because it's missing Chromatic MPEG-1 Video I-Frame (MPEG) codec. Really, I just want a basic playable mpg, I don't want people to have to download new codecs if possible.

So then I tried project X, which says it tries to fix mpgs. Project X processed the file and wrote me an m2v and ac3 file. When playing the m2v in WMP, there's no sound (presumable because it's in the ac3 file) and the picture judders on zooming.

So, I know I'm really close, but I was hoping you guys could save me a lot of time here. Last thing is, when I work this out, I'd like to be able to fix/sort out a lot of files in one go.

many thanks for any help
Dave

[poisondeathray]

Do the original native files play fine vlc or kmplayer or smplayer? or the ones processed by Imagemaker3?

WMP relies on system installed codecs, so if the end user doesn't have the proper directshow splitters/decoders installed, it wont play correctly

The 3 players I mentioned include everything internally. There is even a usb version for vlc, so no need to install.

[jagabo]

I think poisondeathray is right -- you have incompatible MPEG decoding components.

I found a sample MOD video from that camcorder on the net and downloaded it. It appears to be a normal 29.97 fps interlaced MPG file with 704x480 MPEG 2 video and 256 kbps MP2 audio. I assume the UK version will use PAL specs: 720x576, 25 fps.

The sample played perfectly fine on my computer with several different players. You're E8500 should have no problems in terms of CPU power or memory. Here's the link if you want to try the file I downloaded:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/45e9f4/

[dave1892]

Yeah, you're right, it plays fine in vlc. I suppose it's obvious to me now what the problem was, it just never occured to me that WMP was the problem since WMP seems to play everything else fine and I just assumed that the FS100 would be producing ordinary mpgs.

Any ideas how I could fix my WMP? It says that no updates are available.

On the plus side, I've discovered Avidemux which seems like a nice tool for editing.

thanks for your help
Dave

[jagabo]

You can try GraphStudio. That will show you what filters are being used to play the MPG file. That will give you some hints about what is going wrong. You could then build alternate graphs to see if any other filters work better. You can also use MPCHC (disable its internal MPG source and decoder filters) to view your videos then right click and select Filters to see what filters are in use.

There are DirectShow filter managers that will let you remove or deprecate filters. Filmerit, Radlight Filter Manager, etc.

[dave1892]

OK, thanks

[jagabo]

You're probably going to have more questions once you get once you get one of those programs running...