Video Formats

Graffix_God · Post by **Graffix_God** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:30 pm

Guys? what's ups with some of these better quality formats? lol

I mean, I run an overclocked PENTIUM 2, but it still isn't good enough to run .avi or DivX ... the POS.

If you guys want to see the crappy videos I made on this overclocked piece of junk computer, just look me up. Tell me what you think. (A couple I made on my mom's computer, and my FFX-2 one I made on a friend's computer (he had Adobe Premiere 7.0

)

But other than that, I made all my videos on my Pentium 3 hand-me-down computer -kicks it-

Hope you guys like them! (Hopefully)

Graffix_God · Post by **Graffix_God** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 10:31 pm

the second pentium I mentioned above (Pentium 3) it's supposed to be Pentium 2 ... just so ya know

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 1:31 am

Graffix_God wrote:the second pentium I mentioned above (Pentium 3) it's supposed to be Pentium 2 ... just so ya know

Your CPU is weak.

Seriously, it is. Video decoding is much more processor-intensive than you think -- especially the newer formats.

My laptop, which has a Pentium 4 mobile clocked at 1.7 GHz and 1 GB of PC-2700 SDRAM running under Gentoo Linux, has trouble playing high-motion 640x480 XviDs at 29.97fps. (Don't suggest WinXP: it's even worse in that environment. Why do you think I switched?) It cannot handle 640x480 XviDs at 60fps. God forbid I ever try HD.

My Athlon64 3400+, however, hasn't crapped out yet, although I have seen CPU load stay steady at 100% while playing around with H.264 encodes. This isn't really an AMD vs. Intel debate; it's just illustrating that even "high-end" systems can have trouble with this.

If you really want to know how much power is required for this kind of stuff, I suggest you read up on e.g. the H.263 and H.264 standards, as well as peeking at, say, the XviD implementation source code.

Here's a few things you can try:

- Disable postprocessing. For large videos (as in frame size) this can speed things up.
- Clean up your computer's hard drive. Disk access, while not usually a major factor with stuff like DivX/XviD, can still be a problem in highly fragmented drives, and if you happen to use a file system that is prone to excessive fragmentation (i.e. NTFS, FAT32) then this may help.
- Reduce the frame size and try playing that.

FilipinoHOOD · Post by **FilipinoHOOD** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 3:12 pm

lol damn how can you stand P2 well laptop I am using is P4 Mobile but my 1998 Alienware PC is P2, so yeh I will be making movies on that as soon as I get it up and running.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 7:52 pm

I used a 566MHZ with 190mb ram before this comp, and it played them just fine.

I used a 200MHZ with 256MB ram before that one, and it only had problems with Quicktime and really gigantic vids.

trythil, something's definitely wrong when a P4 can't handle what a 566MHZ can with ease...but then again, it's running Linux.

Scandia · Post by **Scandia** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:11 pm

Dude that's OK. I bought my compy less than 2 months ago and still have not been able to play all the formats.

I use MPEG-2. I have no idea what people are talking about in some of those optimal footage guides. You can tell who all the people are in mine, even though the colors may not look gemstone-rich.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 8:26 pm

devilmaykickass wrote:I used a 566MHZ with 190mb ram before this comp, and it played them just fine.

I used a 200MHZ with 256MB ram before that one, and it only had problems with Quicktime and really gigantic vids.

trythil, something's definitely wrong when a P4 can't handle what a 566MHZ can with ease...but then again, it's running Linux.

Try playing cyuson's "around the M@D". That's a 640x480 60fps XviD file, and I guarantee that your 566 MHz will choke on it.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 9:35 pm

trythil wrote:
devilmaykickass wrote:I used a 566MHZ with 190mb ram before this comp, and it played them just fine.

I used a 200MHZ with 256MB ram before that one, and it only had problems with Quicktime and really gigantic vids.

trythil, something's definitely wrong when a P4 can't handle what a 566MHZ can with ease...but then again, it's running Linux.
Try playing cyuson's "around the M@D". That's a 640x480 60fps XviD file, and I guarantee that your 566 MHz will choke on it.

*searches*

*downloads*

*plays*

Wow. Nice vid. and what do you know, it plays with ease.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 10:17 pm

devilmaykickass wrote:Wow. Nice vid. and what do you know, it plays with ease.

The one hosted on the org is a low quality copy. It requires significantly less resources than the full quality version.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 10:41 pm

Zarxrax wrote:
devilmaykickass wrote:Wow. Nice vid. and what do you know, it plays with ease. :D
The one hosted on the org is a low quality copy. It requires significantly less resources than the full quality version.

Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that.

Anyway.

devilmaykickass:

The full quality copy looks like this:

Code: Select all

bash-2.05b$ ls -l around-the-m\@d.avi
-rw-r--r--  1 trythil users 389201920 May 31  2004 around-the-m@d.avi

and has these properties:

Code: Select all

ID_FILENAME="around-the-m@d.avi"
ID_VIDEO_FORMAT=DX50
ID_VIDEO_BITRATE=15997528
ID_VIDEO_WIDTH=640
ID_VIDEO_HEIGHT=480
ID_VIDEO_FPS=59.940
ID_VIDEO_ASPECT=0.0000
ID_AUDIO_CODEC=mp3
ID_AUDIO_FORMAT=85
ID_AUDIO_BITRATE=320000
ID_AUDIO_RATE=44100
ID_AUDIO_NCH=2
ID_LENGTH=190

I'll send the file if you want it. This is the file that causes mplayer, on my P4 mobile, to start dropping excessive frames.

If your 566 MHz whatever can handle that at full framerate, never dropping a frame and keeping audio and video streams reasonably synchronized*, I want to know what your video card and video drivers are.

* "Reasonable", for me, is +/- 0.010 sec. Any more than that, and sync loss becomes noticable. YMMV.