Jittery .mpg playback

[The late XV105]

The first of two posts this evening if I may!

New Lenovo T61 laptop with Core Duo T8300 2.4Ghz, 2MB RAM, 3009MB page file, 120GB (68GB free) 8MB cache Fujitsu MHY2120BH HDD, Diskeeper Pro defragging, and running XP Pro SP2. Media playback via Windows Media Player v11 with default settings including full video acceleration.

Blistering performance apart from one thing that has come to light during my current holiday; without problem I have been backing up .MPEG2 files from Sony HDD camcorder in advance of return home, but find that playback is jittery. Audio is always perfect, but sometimes video will pause for a split second before resuming. Verifying video source via the camcorder shows no recording faults.

I can't believe that the HDD is struggling to keep up as my otherwise much lower spec T41 with very similar Fujitsu HDD had no such troubles.

Things and settings to try, please?

TVM

[The late XV105]

More info;

I downloaded some of the .mpg files from the camcorder for a second time and placed them elsewhere on the freshly "Diskeeper Pro defragged" hard disk.

Playback "jitteriness" of these duplicate files is in exactly the same place, for exactly the same duration, as the originals.

Hmmmm.

Given that playback on the camcorder itself is perfect this made me wonder if Windows Media Player 11 was the cause so I tried playback using the installed WinDVD viewer instead.

Perfect.
Not a single jitter in any file.

So, I am reassured that my backups for the duration of the holiday are all of good quality and when showing them to friends I have a tool (WinDVD) that won't get on my nerves.

Question remains out of interest though as to why WMP11 does what it does, and what I can do to solve it, despite the video acceleration option already being at the default maximum setting?

Cheers.

[NutLoose]

One thought, what format was it recorded as ? and what is it being played back as............ if it's recorded as pal but your playback is ntsc that might do it, or vice versa... another one and not sure about this but can you increase the cache for the player to use? as that acts a buffer to stop it having to keep accessing the file....

[The late XV105]

Which cache do you mean, please, NutLoose? WMP11 video acceleration is already set to max as mentioned, which I assume to be a cache.

Thanks,
XV105

[Parapunter]

WMP doesn't automatically handle all comers as you are experiencing. You may wish to download Gspot codec appliance it's a small utility that will examine the mpeg files in question & give you details on their format.

From there, you may discover that you require a codec to run them, such as divx or ffdshow tryouts. I would have thought the cache size only applies to streaming content?

[Shunter]

You may also wish to download VLC and use that instead.

Windows Media Player is a fat, lardy pain in the backside.

[The late XV105]

Thanks Guys.

I'll try the codec route out of interest, but if it fails to help as I expect (see comment that follows as to why), I'll simply use WinDVD instead as it works flawlessly. The only reason I want to "fix" WMP11 is simply because it works fine with the same .mpg files on another XP SP2 PC on which I installed it during the same evening and which has since been subject to the same Windows updates, so the pedant in me expects it to work on my laptop too!

[Parapunter]

Does your desktop have exactly the same software suite as your lappy? Can it be possible you are missing a codec on the wee machine??

[The late XV105]

What a neat tool, Parapunter.
Thanks for the link. :-)

Although it duly confirms "Codecs installed" on the latop (and PC for good measure), as a video authoring hobbyist it could prove even more useful in future especially with its other features so I will keep it.