Quicktime H.264 720p vs. AthlonXP

[swaaye]

Is there any way to get an old Athlon XP running a video encoded with Quicktime H.264 at 720p to run smoothly? I was surprised when a friend's 2.5GHz overclocked Barton was totally chopping out when my laptop's 2.13Ghz Pentium M ran it almost completely smooth (i think i saw it jerk a couple of times).

I can only guess that either his 6800GT didn't accelerate the video as well as my laptop's 6800Go (6800GS). Or, that his lack of SSE2 is doing him in?

[Doom9]

The encoder program doesnt matter as much as as the decoder that is being used. E.g. CoreAVC is a lot more effective than Quicktime.

[Sharktooth]

Is there any way to get an old Athlon XP running a video encoded with Quicktime H.264 at 720p to run smoothly? I was surprised when a friend's 2.5GHz overclocked Barton was totally chopping out when my laptop's 2.13Ghz Pentium M ran it almost completely smooth (i think i saw it jerk a couple of times).

I can only guess that either his 6800GT didn't accelerate the video as well as my laptop's 6800Go (6800GS). Or, that his lack of SSE2 is doing him in?
QuickTime doesnt have ANY HW acceleration support for h.264.
However, nv 6800GT and ULTRA chips are buggy and have some disabled functions.
For optimal performance, get MPC (media player classic), set it's output to Overlay mixer and buy CoreAVC (just few bucks) or find the beta (and unsupported) version and try it.

[swaaye]

the file is a .mov though. It didn't seem to want to play back in anything without a quicktime codec. Quicktime alternative plays it thru MPC.

Will check out coreavc.

[swaaye]

Ok my friend says it's playing perfect now, but he has no audio. Does quicktime use some sort of special audio filter?

This is the HD supremecommander trailer btw.

[Theliel]

use zoomplayer. for play any .mov file:

zoomplayer with this filter:

Haali media spliter (all options enable when install)
CoreAVC, ffdshow... (any codec for AVC that you want)

for sound... most provable sound are AAC, you can use CoreAAC, ffdshow, new Cyberlink PowerDVD7 aac codec...

with MPC, is same, but you can't choose codec to player. Install ffdshow or coreAAC for sound and should work fine

I recomended ZP, haali, CoreAVC and CoreAAC. (if you don't Hardware accell H.264). If you can use hardware accell (purevideo), you can use powerDVD7 or last WinDVD.

[Yong]

Try mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html),
with -lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=all commands.

[imcold]

the file is a .mov though. It didn't seem to want to play back in anything without a quicktime codec. Quicktime alternative plays it thru MPC.

Try renaming it to .mp4 :D

[Manao]

-lavdopts fast:skiploopfilter=allNo need for. FFDshow, vlc or mplayer alone be fast enough on his computer to play back the video, without having to use that dirty trick. And while I'm at it, when advising somebody to do that, could you put a big fat disclaimer saying that quality will be reduced when doing so ?

[shon3i]

You can remux this mov with YAMB to mp4 and play it with you favorite player with ffdshow or coreavc, or you can try even play this mov file with any player because if you have installed nero, nero's quicktime plugin will be automaticly started.

[sysKin]

This is the HD supremecommander trailer btw.

Great trailer isn't it? ^^

Unfortunately someone was "smart" enough to use some weird QT audio format, so this is not an .mp4 file and it doesn't seem to play without QT alternative :(

[edit] the audio is actually uncompressed PCM

[foxyshadis]

What. I thought the era of people using pcm audio for internet music video downloads ended in the 90's. Why even bother with AVC if you're going to use a higher bitrate on the audio anyway. >.>;;

[xyloy]

You can remux it to MKV with MKVmergeGUI to use directshow filters. ;)

[bond]

Try renaming it to .mp4 :DYou can remux this mov with YAMB to mp4 and play it with you favorite player with ffdshow or coreavc, or you can try even play this mov file with any player because if you have installed nero, nero's quicktime plugin will be automaticly started.no need to rename from .mov to .mp4, nor to remux with mp4box, nor to install quicktime or anything else except mpc

open the mpc options dialog and enable the "mp4/mov splitter", install ffdshow or coreavc (or another avc decoder) and play the file in mpc

thats it

edit: obviously remuxing from .mov to .mp4 with yamb/mp4box is a good idea, cause using mov for avc sucks :D

[swaaye]

yes yes. But it doesn't fix the audio so it doesn't work any better than renaming it to .mp4. The only way to get audio is to use Quicktime Alternative. As a .mov the CoreAVC codec is ignored so I'm back to square one.

[bond]

yes yes. But it doesn't fix the audio so it doesn't work any better than renaming it to .mp4. The only way to get audio is to use Quicktime Alternative. As a .mov the CoreAVC codec is ignored so I'm back to square one.i assume the audio codec is aac, so simply install coreaac or enable the internal aac decoder in mpc

[swaaye]

Well that's what I thought too and did install that CoreAAC I believe it's called (and ffdshow). Neither can handle the audio. sisKin above says it's actually PCM! If so that's just crazy! LOL. What a way to waste bandwidth.

[shon3i]

obviously remuxing from .mov to .mp4 with yamb/mp4box is a good idea, cause using mov for avc sucks I just say that in my previous post, remuxing mov->mp4 even better to mkv not disturb anything only can help much

[swaaye]

I'd like to see a solution to playing these quicktimes back though because so many HD quicktimes are going to show up.

[shon3i]

I playing mov files with bsplayer but tought some nero QT plugin, and playnig just fine any mov files especialy AVC trailers 720p with CoreAVC

[sysKin]

i assume the audio codec is aac, so simply install coreaac or enable the internal aac decoder in mpc
See what I said about audio (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=837357#post837357). It's just not an mp4 file at all, it's a mov with 4cc=AVC1 video and 4cc=SOWT audio :(

Actually I'd like to recompress audio and make it an mp4. It's trivial to make it a matroska file, but how can I remux video into an mp4? Can mp4box open a mov file and ignore audio?

[edit] Haha yes it can :)
MP4Box.exe -add SupremeCommander_E3_Trailer_BigHD_SupremeCommanderHQ.com.mov test.mp4
IsoMedia import - skipping track ID 1 (unknown type 'sowt')
IsoMedia import - track ID 2 - Video (size 1280 x 720)
Saving to test.mp4: 0.500 secs Interleaving

[imcold]

you can always mux to matroska and then demux separate tracks from it >> mux them with mp4box ;)

[xyloy]

Try renaming it to .hdmov if you use QT Alternative. It will enable the use of directshow filters such as CoreAVC and CoreAAC instead of QT's poor decoders.

[videomixer9]

http://xs301.xs.to/xs301/06233/mpcquicktime.png

You have to nothing except to set this here to DirectShow (yeah the thing in the back are dropdown fields if you click them), it's set per default to Quicktime and will make MPC use the Quicktime ActiveX to play the videos. (in Zoomplayer this is the same, under video rendering options you'll find an option "Use Quicktime ActiveX" which is checked per default, uncheck this to make Zoomplayer use DirectShow instead.)

All that Quicktime Alternative does is to add a filetype .hdmov under Others, and others is set to DirectShow per default, so it will handle the .movs. Nero Splitter usually breaks playback nicely, it's better to block all Nero filters that try to deal with this, especially the famous NDParser.ax ones.

Windows should come with a mov splitter that should work fine, at least my Windows XP had one to begin with. Of course gabest one might be better to use.

Absolut no renaming required and usual DirectShow Playback. The problem with the missing sound is probably due to some other crap on the system.

On http://www.cccp-project.net/ you can find a tool named Insurgent, use this and export your installed filters or give us a test rendering of the files in question.

Too many people install crappy codecs packs and any filter they can find anywhere, many try to fuck around with merits or try to surpress other filters, commercial filters seem to be usually very aggressive in this. The goal of most commercial packs like Nero, Cyberlink etc. is to ruin your videoplayback as much as possible to that you think only their apps are the right ones so that you keep buying their stuff. Just boycott this companies and spend your money for less aggressive and non-hostile filters like the Core Products, or just stick to open and free software.

Twos audio is indeed PCM afaik. "sowt" is twos audio, ffdshow only recently added support for this. Please update to a more recent version. Twos audio was introduced in revision 2542 of ffdshow.

[swaaye]

Ok.

videomixer9, I changed the settings in MPC as you showed. I then installed the latest ffdhow (ffdshow-rev2546-SSE2.exe) (http://ffdshow.faireal.net/#ffdshow) (because the audio codec missing error was still there.) With the PCM Uncompressed option enabled in ffdshow's audio decoder, MPC no longer gives an error about the audio. The video plays extremely slowly, however. Basically MPC freezes up. I even have to kill it in taskman.

Did ffdshow actually work for you?

I do have Nero on here. And I uninstalled all of its components other than Nero Burning ROM itself. I have CoreAVC installed (MPC is using it).

edit: I just tried your latest SSE build with the same result.

[jblade]

Quicktime alternative + Coreavc

rename the .mov to .hdmov

Open with Media Player Classic

My Athlon XP -Mobile plays the 1080p trailers fine.

[BlackSharkfr]

All has been said : there are multiple techniques.
The one i prever is converting mov->mkv using mkvmerge(gui) and then playback using mpc + coreAVC (alpha)
I have an Athlon XP 2000+ and 720p trailers from apple play fine.

[swaaye]

Quicktime alternative + Coreavc

rename the .mov to .hdmov

Open with Media Player Classic

My Athlon XP -Mobile plays the 1080p trailers fine.

I think a lot of ya don't read the whole thread. I keep getting the same ideas over and over lol.

This one does not work because the audio in this MOV is in a very strange format that nothing seems to play back.

[ChronoCross]

There is a method you might be able to use.

Convert the file to mkv using mkvmerge.
Open the file in Virtualdubmod
Demux the audio to .wav
Set the audio to disabled
Use direct stream copy to save to mkv (video only)
Encode .wav to aac (mp4)
merge to either mkv or mp4 (video and audio)

This might work.