How come some mp4's are slow/choppy in Windows Media Player and VLC Player?

[cool09]

Occasionally an mp4 file I download won't play or plays very slow/choppy in Windows Media Player so I have to open it in VLC Player. And sometimes it's slow/choppy in VLC, too, I'm using VLC Player 3.0.14. WMP is current version and Windows 10.

Some times I convert the mp4 to mkv in Avidemux and play it in VLC Player. (WMP won't play mkv.)

[Anonymous84]

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[jagabo]

Mp4 is a container format -- a standardized "box" that holds video, audio, and other stuff. Those can be compressed (or not) with a variety of different codecs. If you can't play a file smoothly it's probably because your computer isn't powerful enough to handle the codec or frame size. A more powerful CPU or GPU may help.

[cool09]

In VLC, I disabled "Hardware accelerated decoding" and changed "Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding" to "All" in Preferences-Input/Codecs and the mp4 still hesitated. I didn't try changing "Video Output Module" in Advanced Preferences. I had trouble finding the caching setting.
The HEVC I had trouble playing is 1280x720. I can usually play larger mp4 videos with no problem.
My CPU is Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10600K CPU @ 4.10GHz 4.10 GHz.
Should I upgrade to a newer VLC version?

[davexnet]

Try mpc-hc and/or mpc-be to see if the problem occurs.

My 10 year old AMD FX CPU can play these videos in VLC without any problems, using about 10% processor load/

Are you using a laptop? Possibly something to do with power savings?

[jagabo]

What is the frame rate of the video? Higher frame rates require more decoding speed -- for example smooth playback of 60 fps videos requires each frame be decompressed in less than 1/60 second (at least, on average), whereas 30 fps only require 1/30 second per frame.

Also, more complex encoder settings can require more decoding speed. GPU's usually don't support the most complex HEVC features. Switching to CPU decoding rather than GPU decoding (like you did) will eliminate that issue. What kind of CPU usage do you see when using CPU decoding?

[netmask56]

WMP not the best media player - ditch it for one of the players mentioned. Also to wrap a mp4 file in a MKV container try MKVToolnix , quick and lists any errors that may be present.