Quicksand Fans

Alas, VideoLan's VLC player (version 1.05) doesn't seem to work for me on the new generation of .mp4 video files that mudpuddlevisuals and others are using, presumably because of the higher resolution. Upgraded to the current issue of VLC and it did even worse. Some years back VLC solved all my playback problems after I tried it on recommendation from folks here so now I'm back where I started without a plays-all-player.

Does anyone here know of anything better than VLC for playing these newer higher resolution .mp4's?

Or is this all ultimately just a matter of needing a new graphics card? Or would that even fix it?

The best players and codecs out there are VLC, ffdshow (part of countless codec packs), and CoreAVC. Core is said to be the most efficient one, but it's not free, and when I gave the free trial a try, it didn't seem any more efficient than the others. In any case, not even it was good enough to allow my system to plow through these HD videos.

CoreAVC supports hardware acceleration through newer video cards, but I don't think the acceleration would be enough if your CPU is too old. I know mine is too old.

What are your system specs?

As an example, mine include a Pentium III 1.4GHz CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card.

I find that I can play the new super high resolution mp4 files with VLC... but if I try to skip ahead or go back in the video, then it screws up. However, I can still fast forward or slow motion a video with the plus or minus keys on the keyboard.

Some of the higher compression algorithms being used these days are literally too much for even moderately aged systems to handle. What kind of hardware are you trying to play these files on?

3.00GHz Pentium with 1Meg of RAM. Not good right?

If it's an honest Pentium rather than some derivative, then yeah, it's got some age on it. With 1GB of ram, you're also relying heavily on virtual memory, which is going to bottle-neck you to the throughput of your hard drive. If you're having trouble with MPV videos, I'm not surprised -- Dave is cranking out a phenomenal bitrate on his videos these days, and a system like this simply wouldn't be able to keep up. Tripling the ram would probably help, but you would get more bang for your buck by trading up.

The Dell Outlet Store is a great source for refurbished, "brand new, slightly used" PCs/laptops. If you prefer to build, Newegg is a great starting point, as they have core bundles that really take the headache out of mixing and matching parts. On either front, you could probably score 5-6 times the machine for around $500.

Thanks, yeah, I build 'em myself, you get a lot more for the money that way, haven't had any need to upgrade until now.

Yeah, a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU falls short for CPU-intensive 1080p video. Your system is probably strong enough for 720p, but 1080p demands a machine made in the past two or three years, especially 1080p MP4 video. I sometimes wonder if this is taken into account when video previews only in 1080p MP4 format are posted on this forum.

It was not taken into account, by me, but it will be.

quicksanimator wrote:Yeah, a 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU falls short for CPU-intensive 1080p video. Your system is probably strong enough for 720p, but 1080p demands a machine made in the past two or three years, especially 1080p MP4 video. I sometimes wonder if this is taken into account when video previews only in 1080p MP4 format are posted on this forum.

Agreed with Kookus, almost certainly a hardware issue. I downloaded VLC on advice from Fred when I was getting choppy playback with WMV. Works like a charm for me but I'm running a less then year old gaming machine with a quad core chip and high end graphics card.