ace's media player

[Sideous Prime]

have you tried to encode your video in another codec other than the shitty wmv codec? media player 11 blows all the way around. no doubt about it but it is here to stay. there are other great alternatives for video, like the classic media player, zoom player, and vlc media player. the best video codec on the face of the earth is the high definition h.264 codec. you will need either, quick time pro or an editor to do your encoding. quick time will handle your playback.

[law.of.averages]

bah... Store all your video uncompressed and you won't need any codec

[Sideous Prime]

bah... Store all your video uncompressed and you won't need any codec

LOL. tastes great, more filling

[Ace]

For the record VLC plays the wmv on my XP laptop like crap, which has more power then the PC with the Vista now on it. Predictions for VLC on the Vista machine and the same file?

Just for a fair shake and the super h.264 codec, I have sample video from Canon's site with their HV10 cam at 720 and 1080, VLC has problems playing both on my laptop as well. They play just fine using Quicktime. The reason I bring it up, I'd expect things made using Quicktime would play best with Quicktime. Same as with the wmv file, I'd expect it to play best in Media Player, and it does....provided it's not Vista.

I'll definitely try encoding with something else for testing. After lunch, Quicktime is going on the Vista machine with an official h.264 movie, if that runs like crap...then what's the theory?

::Edit:: The 1080, dumps probably about half the frames. The 720 isn't as bad, but still isn't watchable.

[Sideous Prime]

definitely test it out and see what codec, compression, and bitrate plays best. if you have quicktime pro, that will do h.264 the best, hands down. and yes it will only play in quicktime.

h.264 is a high definition codec. you get incredible results for such a small file size. great for streaming.

i would imagine you will get the same result with vlc on vista as you did with xp with your video file. HD video is incredibly processor intensive no matter what format you choose.

on the whole, i have found the media player 11 is awful for video. i play most of my video in media player classic or zoom player, or if i want to use h.264 i use quicktime. MP11 is so bloated, it really hogs the resources large videos need to run smoothly. IMHO, without a doubt, to play HD video that have large file sizes you would be better off using another player to support your video.

[Ace]

(Stuck the results from the QT Vista test in my previous message)

The fact that it ran fine prior to putting Vista on it (I'm assuming the QT stuff would have worked fine, but never tested), that leaves us with Vista just sucks.

Another aspect that I didn't consider, but probably should have, was memory usage. Looking that the machine, when the HDV is playing, the RAM is dangerously close to swapping back to the hard drive as it's playing. That could be the reason why the HDV sucks so bad on the Vista machine. I didn't give any real thought to that, but OS by itself takes 3 times(!) the RAM than XP took when running nothing.

I'm not donating my laptop to the Vista downgrade experiment, so this is where my experimentation ends for a while. But, I'll reiterate that an OS should be able to do the exact same functions it could do with the previous version.

[Sideous Prime]

i'm curious, is that 1080i or 1080p? the difference is more than one might think. if you used 1080p...let me just say that my box doesn't play 1080p flawlessly. 1080p is friggin nuts. i get about 90% of the frames. when you watch it on 720 was that 720i or 720p?

i'm not trying to defend vista, but xp had the same issue. it used more RAM than 2000 did. probably not more than vista vs. xp, but i do remember people having problems with it. i was one.

[Ace]

Link to 720 About 80 Megs

Link to 1080 About 120 Megs

Looking again at the site, Canon says they are 720p and 1080p. Is there something out there that would say for sure? Reason I ask is because the camera they are demo'ing in the video only does 720i and 1080i...so there is some lying going on if they are saying the video is coming from the HV10 or they are lying with the formatting.

Now the newer HV20 camera they have does 24p, but if I'm not mistaken that deals with the fps, but I still believe coming out of the camera is only the 720i and 1080i formats.

Regardless, whatever those files really are, they play fine on my laptop. Could be dropping frames, but I wouldn't know it by watching it, because everything seems smooth. When watching either on the Vista machine, it's unwatchable because it's a jerky mess.

[Sideous Prime]

the links were toast, i'll track them down later.

24p is true 24 fps PROGRESSIVE frame. as far as finding out what video file is 1080i and 1080p i have no idea. maybe a video editor will tell you. maybe not. that would be something that would have to be researched.

i agree with you, if it plays on your laptop, sweet. more than likely vista's resource managment is causing the bottleneck when it comes to video playback. if your xp laptop was dropping packets you would know.

i was pondering a knew video editing box, but with these vista issues i may have to do some more research....or get a mac pro

[Ace]

D'oh! Bastards have those vids hidden with multiple windows. It would take me about 3 pages of directions to get to them. Tomorrow I'll link'em off my server.