Reclock and jerky video

[mjacobson]

Newbie to PC video, just spent about a month submerged in this stuff...

Have been recording from TV, using WinTV-PVR250, which works very nicely.

Noticed that playback was jerky or jumpy. Especially noticeable and bothersome when viewing "news crawl" at the bottom of news stations. Not a recording problem, since if I take the MPEG2 video and burn it to a DVD, it plays super smoothly on a standalone player. But always jerky when playing either the MPEG or the resultant DVD on a PC. This was the case with multiple trial downloads of DVD players, and also on three different computers (two desktops and one laptop).

Problem has been totally fixed on my computers, and with most of the software players, using the ReClock utility. Unfortunately, I found getting ReClock to work at times extremely difficult. Sometimes I had to uninstall certain decoders to make it work. Sometimes I had to tweak all sorts of settings that I have no idea what they do. But I have gotten it to work, and it eliminates the jerky playback consistently.

What I don't understand is why this problem isn't more widely known/discussed. When I Google these issues, most of the suggestions revolve around speed of computer, making sure drive access is DMA not PIO, making sure other stuff isn't going on in background. Maybe these are problems for others, but they didn't help me.

From my understanding of ReClock's rather hard-to-understand explanation, the problem has something to do with NTSC being at 29.97 Hz, which conflicts with the monitor refresh rate of 30 Hz. If this is as common an issue as I would expect, shouldn't the software players come up with a better solution?

Just curious.

MJ

[Joe Fenton]

I never bothered with reclock since BSPlayer does the same thing itself. Any good player out now makes reclock obsolete because they do something similar in the player.

[mjacobson]

I downloaded a trial version of BSPlayer, and ran into the same video jerkiness, which was again corrected by reclock.

It may be that the jerkiness I am referring to is quite subtle, and only visible when you view something like the news crawl, which is a smooth, slow, continuous motion.

MJ

[Ryokurin]

you kind of have to keep in mind how old the NTSC standard is and what monitors were originally meant for. NTSC was created in the 50s and they didnt account for people watching video on computers and monitors are almost vice versa. Not to meantion how some video cards function completely opposite of others for the same basic means.

I would say that in general most people who get far enough to find out what reclock is and stick with it long enough to figure it out usually are patient enough to find something that works.

oh, and in my experience thats usually is an interlaceing issue. remember TVs are interlaced, monitors are not so unless you run it with something that can actively run the video in a bob or weave (or a combination) you are going to run into issues on a monitor.

[Kandor]

Have to agree with the guy about the jerky playback.

I get jerky playback on everything that I try to play throu my computer even after buying an x-card that is suppose to be hardware player.

the reclock solved the jerkyness of my divx, xvid movies but I could not get it to work with any software dvd players.

But if I play the same movie in a sationary player its plays smothly as butter.

and I have an Athlon XP 1900+ for my video playback so it is not the computer.

So I dont agree that it has to do with interlaced material.
it is doing it on my PAL dvds

Best regards
Amin