Problem with playing MPEG-4s

[Draegan]

First, I know nothing about the guts of video and their formats, I just want to put that out there.

I have a bunch of MPEG-4 videos I want to watch.  I've tried both the latest Quicktime and DivX players, latest codecs and every time I try to play the videos I get a half second of sound and the program freezes.

Right now I'm converting the files to .avi's but it's a long process.  What am I doing wrong?

[grebo]

They always play fine on VideoLan for me, but I don't have enough computer to play them well, stutter and whatnot.

[Oban]

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Draegan]

Nice call on the player.  Working fine for me now.  Thanks guys!

[Trippy]

First, I know nothing about the guts of video and their formats, I just want to put that out there.

I have a bunch of MPEG-4 videos I want to watch.  I've tried both the latest Quicktime and DivX players, latest codecs and every time I try to play the videos I get a half second of sound and the program freezes.

Right now I'm converting the files to .avi's but it's a long process.  What am I doing wrong?

If you really want to know the problem I can help but it's an incredibly complicated process to debug Windows audio/video playback system.

[rattran]

I always found vlc to be buggy, I use mplayer with the mpui gui http://mpui.sourceforge.net/
It's just nice having the same player on both the windows and the linux boxen.

[Draegan]

First, I know nothing about the guts of video and their formats, I just want to put that out there.

I have a bunch of MPEG-4 videos I want to watch.  I've tried both the latest Quicktime and DivX players, latest codecs and every time I try to play the videos I get a half second of sound and the program freezes.

Right now I'm converting the files to .avi's but it's a long process.  What am I doing wrong?

If you really want to know the problem I can help but it's an incredibly complicated process to debug Windows audio/video playback system.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm happily watching Battlestar Galactica Season 2 right now.  I'm not sure I'm capable of debugging anything.  Matlab is the farthest I got with programming back in my Aerospace Engineering days.

[Trippy]

It doesn't involve programming but it does involve installing a bunch of stuff so you can trace through the chain of DirectShow filters that are being used (or trying to be used) to playback the videos. Then you have to go through another series of steps to fix that chain so it's working properly.

VideoLan works in many cases where other media players don't because it's a cross-platform media player so it bypasses DirectShow in many cases. E.g. it has the Xvid codec built right into it so even if you don't have the separate DirectShow Xvid codecs installed it can still play back Xvid videos (which is the most common format for BitTorrent AVI files).

[Trippy]

I always found vlc to be buggy, I use mplayer with the mpui gui http://mpui.sourceforge.net/
It's just nice having the same player on both the windows and the linux boxen.

Hmm...I've never had a problem with VLC on Windows or the Mac. It does have some limitations since it's underlying architecture is designed for streaming so it doesn't do things like frame advance and stuff like that but for basic playback it's nice since it avoids most of the DirectShow crap (as mentioned above) and I have so much AV crap on this machine now that some stuff just doesn't work properly in regular DS players.

[rattran]

vlc had trouble quitting cleanly on the linux box, and I'm usually doing 3 or 4 things at the desk, so I tend to pause video a lot, or rewind 2 mins. Which vlc never seemed to like. I'd try it again (it's been about 18months) but I'm quite happy with mplayer.

And I use it for music playing.