VLC vs. PotPlayer audio slowdown quality

[falco2000]

Hello. Is it possible to have in PotPlayer the same slowdown algorithm/engine that VLC uses to slow down the audio of a movie when the playback speed is set below 1x? For example, VLC audio at 0.5x is far better than PotPlayer's one. PotPlayer's engine creates a lot of delay/reverb/flanger effect.

Or does anyone know if the settings for the PotPlayer engine can be manually adjusted to get better results?

Thank you very much and best regards.

[Hoser Rob]

I don't think so. Potplayer isn't bad (I never uninstalled it in windows) but it's one of those programs that looks simple and fully featured ... until you scratch just below the surface.

Though smplayer is my default player (and I have no idea how it slows down audio) vlc is my second choice. Why not just use that? It's overrated but way better than potplayer.

Just take a good look at the threads on this site and see how many complaints or problems there are with vlc or smplayer. Not many. Potplayer? Tons.

[falco2000]

I use VLC and PotPlayer, but don't like the fact that I can't assign shortcut keys to control the picture position and dimensions (independently). PotPlayer can, and I use this feature very often.

Maybe I should have asked if anyone knows I to do these assignments and choose VLC, instead of the opposite I only found shortcuts to zoom in the picture, not to move it or to stretch one dimension independently from the other one.

[falco2000]

I tested SMPlayer, but unfortunately when decreasing speed the audio pitch goes down too

[Hoser Rob]

Well, since the developer is Korean, and that's the language the potplayer web site is in, and from all indications the developer doesn't speak English, maybe you should learn Korean so you could ask him to include vlc libraries in his program.

And potplayer may have hotkeys for position and size (which may be assignable in vlc), maybe you could also ask the developer why, if you load a video playlist and have to force aspect ratio for one of them, it applies that ratio to all the other videos as well? That's really stupid.

[hello_hello]

falco2000,
MPC-HC does both the things you're wanting to do. It'll play video at half or double speed without changing the pitch and the audio quality is still fairly good.

Changing the picture zoom or stretching it etc is done using the numeric keys on the keypad, which is frighteningly logical as it revolves around the centre "5" key by default. For instance the "4" key reduces the video width while the "6" key increases it. "9" zooms out and "1" zooms in etc. The "5" key always resets it.
The same principle applies when moving the video up/down, left/right or diagonally within the player window. You just need to hold down the Ctrl key while using the numeric keys. If you use the Alt key and the numeric keypad, it rotates the picture instead.

Like you I often change the zoom and move the picture position. The ability to move the picture up and down allows me to zoom 4:3 video until it fills the screen without people's heads being cut off, so much of the time I quickly forget the video is really 4:3.

An ability to "pan and scan" is one of the first things I look for when testing a new player, along with the ability to pause and restart the video simply by clicking on it, and of course use custom pixel shaders. As a result I've always gone back to MPC-HC pretty quickly. If you don't like the default keypad arrangement, I'm pretty sure you can change the key assignments to whatever you like.

Oh..... and you can have more than one instance of MPC-HC installed/running at a time and each can have it's own configuration. Just use the portable version and copy it to several places in Program Files or something similar and tell each to save it's settings to an ini file. Then you can tell one instance of MPC-HC to remember the last window size and pan and scan settings etc, but another instance not to, and one shortcut can open a player which defaults to your favourite zoom and picture position, while another shortcut will open a player which uses the default settings and another shortcut does something else. Fun stuff like that. Of course only one of them can be the default player, which is where the Windows SendTo menu comes in handy

I'm pretty sure MPC-HC remembers it's current pan and scan and aspect ratio settings as it opens successive videos, as having to re-do them each time would be fairly dumb. However if you tell it not to remember settings when you close it, it'll go back to the defaults next time you run it.