Video playback jerky... ?

[Buzz Lightyear]

I really didn't know where to put this question, so if it doesn't belong here, please move it. :)

I am trying to encode "Pirates of the Carribean" from DVD to XviD using GK (0.28.8). Everything works fine, except that the final movie has a little jerky playback sometimes. You can notice it best in scenes with full-screen panning, but not in all.
That only applies to the video. Audio is fine and not out of sync.

DVD2AVI says it's PAL interlaced with 25fps. But when looking at the output it doesn't look interlaced at all. I figured that it's one of these "progressive saved as interlaced" DVD's.
So I encoded it once with "field deinterlace" and once without. Video looked OK both times (average bitrate around 1100kbps), but playback is still jerky from time to time. The strange thing is, that when I look at the properties of the playback filter, the "average fps" is between 19 and 21. (!) Not around 25, as it should be. (Speed of my computer is _not_ the problem. All my other movies work fine.)

Am I getting hallucinations now, or is there something I could do about that? I never before had this problem, and though I'm not an expert ripper I've been using GK for quite some time now...
Btw, I didn't touch any of the XviD options. So no QPEL or GMC.

Could anyone please enlighten me? :)

[joshyg2]

sounds to me like its a playback problem, not an encoding problem.

what video card are you using?

are you using overlay to playback your video?

what are your DMA settings for your drives (hard drive, cd roms)?

do you have other applications running in the background?

and finaly

what decoder are you using to playback the files?
tip: use ffdshow to playback your Xvid, DivX files.

[manono]

Hi-

So, what's the final framerate? If you don't know, open it in VDubMod and go File->File Information->Top Line and check. If it's 20fps, and not 25fps, then there's your answer right there.

And don't deinterlace non-interlaced movies. If the .d2v opened in GKnot doesn't show combing when you advance a frame at a time, then it's not interlaced, no matter what DVD2AVI tells you.

[avih]

using re-clock might help too (don't forget to adjust your monitor refresh rate to a multiple of the clip framerate).

[Buzz Lightyear]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I found the problem. joshyg2 was right. It's playback problem. It's ffdshow!! (I install that routinely on all PCs I can lay my hands on... at least until now)

I tried the movie on 3 different PCs (all with ffdshow, all with Geforce 4+, all with 1,8Ghz+, all much faster then a PC has to be to play XviD ;) ) and they all showed a playback rate of ~19..21 fps, although the movie is correctly encoded with 25 fps (says VDubMod). I tried Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic (my default) and even WinDVD, but they all showed the same behavior.
I switched between VMR9, VMR7 and overlay (in MPC), but no change.
Then I uninstalled ffdshow, and woooooooops, everything worked fine. The movie plays like a charm!

Damn! So what am I gonna do now. I never had a problem with ffdshow before. Could it be that ffdshow and XviD 1.0RC4 don't work together? What ffdshow version are you guys using. The latest "stable" build at sourceforge is dated 2002-06-17! That's like from the stoneage. Is it save to use newer builds I find on the net?

And btw I have 2 different MP3 audio streams in that movie. But I don't think that causes my problem, cause now (without ffdshow) it works fine.

@avih: "don't forget to adjust your monitor refresh rate to a multiple of the clip framerate" What? I never heard that before. Sound to me like voodoo...

[avih]

reclock adjust the video playback framerate to match the screen refresh such that the playback is synched with the monitor. it results in a MUCH smoother playback.

however, to be able to achieve this, you should set the monitor refresh rate (desktop->right click->settings->advanced->monitor) to something close to a multiple of the clip framerate.

i.e. if your clip is 25fps, you should set your monitor refresh to 75/100/125/etc Hz.

if your clip is 23.97fps, then 72hz would be good.

if your clip is 29.97fps, then 60/120hz would be best.

give it a try, you'll get a much smoother playback. if reclock CAN sync, the tray icon will be green. otherwise, it's gonna be yellow.

[bond]

Originally posted by Buzz Lightyear
Could it be that ffdshow and XviD 1.0RC4 don't work together?some ffdshow builds (for example the latest one on sourceforge) dont handle packed bitstream xvid encodes right

use search and grap the latest ffdshow build from athos and see if it works correctly

[manono]

Hi-

Since I wasn't any help with your problem (good one, joshyg2), I thought I'd save you the trouble of tracking down ffdshow:

http://athos.leffe.dnsalias.com/

There are a couple of tips on setting it up correctly here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74289&highlight=ffdshow

[Buzz Lightyear]

@avih: OK. Will give it a try (once I find the time ;)). But I watch most of my movies on my notebook anyway. So I'm stuck with 60Hz. But let's see what i can do at my desktop.

@bond: OK. I will play around with the different ffdshow versions.

@manono: Thanks for the links. That's exactly what I've been looking for!

@all: Thanks for the help!

[Buzz Lightyear]

I just tried ffdshow 24-04-2004 (which I found at http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDShow.htm). That works fine. Framerate is back at ~25fps, where it should be.

[KyleK]

I had the exact same problem today. After a while I found out, that the .d2v file mentioned a wrong frame rate of 20fps (Frame_Rate=20000).
I have no idea why it did that, at all. I've been using robot4rip for all the pre-encoding stuff, so maybe there lies the problem.

[jggimi]

@Kylex:

If one incorrectly runs DVD2AVI with Force Film on for PAL sources, 20fps .d2v files will be the result. You'll have to go back to your R4R logs to see why, if R4R was used.