SMPlayer and HD playback

[captainsark]

SMPlayer keeps going out of sync playing a 1 hour and 13 minutes movie of 4.5 GB data file. When play is pressed it will start in sync anywhere in the movie, and then the picture will slowly loose speed. So there's nothing to adjust with avidemux. And choosing sync enabled in SMPlayer doesn't help. Remuxing neither helps.

It's a popular movie found in a better quality, so it would be a waste if it had to be converted to lower quality.

PC's graphics card is Geforce GT 620M

Uploaded a videoclip of the problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8WvhXyJ-Tw

[aedipuss]

is it out of syc if you play it with a different player? try vlc or mpc-hc. "found" movies are not always any good though. it might be time to just delete it.

[captainsark]

Thx, for the answer. Didn't see any reason why vlc player should work any better, but it actually does.

Tested both more times both in fullscreen/window mode, don't get why but SMPlayer just don't keep sync.

[jagabo]

Didn't see any reason why vlc player should work any better, but it actually does.

Different players, different bugs.

[bat999]

...

[Hoser Rob]

How do you know it's "found in a better quality"? I've seen plenty of terrible high bit rate encodes. User feedback on those sites I suspect you got it from are largely useless.

My #1 video player is smplayer. If it doesn't play something properly I'll try vlc. Sometimes it'll play it better but it's usually worse.

Things like hard frame drop can actually be turned on in the smplayer settings. The only advanced -> mplayer option I use is cache-min 50 ... this will make it use the local file stream cache more efficiently. It will load video a bit slower on startup but it'll definitely have better video performance.

Of course, you need to set up the local file stream cache for this to work. For some reason it's empty by default. I set it to 8192. This gives you a big performance benefit and, for some really stupid reason, was disabled in vlc as of 2.0.

Set up like this I can play quite high bit rate h.264 ... my test is a 16Gb 1080p video file, properly encoded. It plays it flawlessly, no sync or judder problems at all. On an i3 laptop with no separate gpu, just intel integrated graphics.

Which is why I suspect the video file you're talking about was encoded on a machine that had one of those weird not 100% compatible 3rd party codecs. Which microsoft specifically recommends you not use in windows 7.

Usually smplayer handles that type of thing better than vlc, believe it or not, but not always. Which is why they're the only video players I use.

[captainsark]

How do you know it's "found in a better quality"? I've seen plenty of terrible high bit rate encodes. User feedback on those sites I suspect you got it from are largely useless.

My #1 video player is smplayer. If it doesn't play something properly I'll try vlc. Sometimes it'll play it better but it's usually worse.

When sitting close to screen the compression is noticeable. But the better quality even surprised, because in a scene on a field it was actually raining. Never noticed that before on the low quality picture. And compression is not noticeable on the better quality.

After using smplayer for a couple of years it's become a bit nostalgic. But the problem with it could be that it does not use hardware rendering properly. Video graphics cards for entertainment have routines for movie playback.

It has happened before that smplayer wouldn't play well a very high quality movie and most movies can be converted to lower size, so it wasn't a problem before this new movie serie, that deserves a better quality.