Playback problems

[clairvo]

This is my first contact with xvid. I downloaded the first chapter of the new Spielberg scifi series (Taken) and it is encoded with xvid. I downloaded the codec from http://nic.dnsalias.com/ (following doom9.org link). Playing at real size is not a problem with any player but playing fullscreen throws the following problems with the following players:
- windows media player: horizontal lines move vertically and no real image is displayed (just garbage)
- microdvd player: screen goes blank (white) and you can hear the audio but not see the video
- powerdvd: it shows fine but the playback is choppy, I think because it is 16:9 but at full screen it uses 4:3 (no black bars) and maybe it has to calculate the resizing on the fly and that makes it to be choppy. Although I can change screen ratio in DVD mode I can't when playing this file.

Short question is: what player should I use to view a xvid video on fullscreen without problems?

Thanks a lot

Clairvo

[sh0dan]

What resolution are you running? Your width and height should be diviable with 16 or even better diviable by 32. Some graphic cards have problems showing video that doesn't have these dimensions.

I use a combination of FFDSHOW (as decoder) and Zoomplayer for playback.

[clairvo]

Ok, video is 576x320 so both horizontal and vertical resolution are divisible by 16 and 32. It is almost perfect 16:9. My video card is a voodoo banshee and I use windows 98.

I uninstalled xvid drivers from http://nic.dnsalias.com/ and installed ffdshow from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53761 and now it works better. Full-screen video shows fine in windows media player, powerdvd, microdvd and zoom player. However, only windows media player plays fluid (when it does not hang, which happens 80% of the time), the rest, plays a bit sluggish and choppy, not as much as with the previous codecs though.

Are there any options I can touch within the configuration of ffdshow to improve performance? I don't like windows media player much.

Thanks

Clairvo

[DBaT]

Xvid playback with ffdshow and ZoomPlayer/WMPClassic works perfect
when they are used correctly. In ffdshow go to misc settings and check xvid but I don't think thats causing your problem.

BTW do you have enough CPU power for playback?

[clairvo]

I have been trying more tests. I am talking about zoom player and ffdshow here. I tried the ICT xvid in Misc settings but that didn't help. Maybe I am being very picky about this. In fast moving scenes you can notice like "black curtains" that fall very quickly refreshing the screen, it's not unbearable but it's noticiable. I found that you can notice it too at real size not only full screen, only that in full screen is more noticiable.

Anyway, during some test I could see video information in the ffdshow configuration while the video was playing. This didn't happen all the time though and now I can't make it happen again (I reinstalled and everything). That would give me information about the fps the movie plays back at. Maybe this codec is too cpu intensive. I have tried all flavours of mpeg and divx before and playback performance was never an issue.

Clairvo

[Gazza]

I've been doing some tests with comparing different encode setups (we.g. with and without bframes, etc). I have a 1 GHz P3 with 512Meg ram and I have found that the best playback is achieved with bsplayer.
With bframes all other players max out the processor to 100% causing the video to halt intermittently or run noticeably slow. For some reason, bsplayer uses about 50% processor load and runs smooth.
Without bframes all other players run better but still slow (note, I've been using qpel and ffdshow with xvid enabled through all the tests). Again bsplayer is fine.

I can only assume that bsplayer is doing something that the other players either can't or are not setup to do (I don't know what though as every player has a multitude of settings......).

Maybe try using bsplayer to see if there is any improvement. Let me know how you go.

[clairvo]

Gazza, it's true !! Bsplayer plays flawlessly smooth. Same codecs, same video, same everything and it plays more smoothly than the rest.... even with tmpgenc working in the background, it seems it is not so much about raw cpu power but how this player does it.

Thank you :=) This will be my player of choice for xvid.

[Gazza]

Glad to see that bsplayer resolves your issues. I'm not sure why it does better than other players though. Maybe it translates the video into another schema and not a 'true mpeg4'? I'm not up to speed on the low level tech stuff, but maybe someone who knows these things could explain for us? Anyway at the end of the day bsplayer makes the video run good and that is what counts.

It would be good if gabest's mplayer did the same then I would use that exclusively.

Cheers