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Playback of h.264 video on older PC
I have a simple question (I think!)
I have an older PC at home which I use mainly for internet and word processing…no big deal. Well, I have also started using it for storage…backup of my Canon 60D video files on the internal hard drive (7200 rpm). The PC is a 2.8 gHz Pentium 4 computer with a gig or two of ram. Playback of the video files is extremely slow and choppy…it freezes and plays a frame or two every second.
I think it’s slow because it’s decoding the h.264. My question is, is that an issue with the processor speed, my graphics card (I don’t remember what it is off the top of my head, it might be a 256mb), or something different altogether?
I’m thinking of doing some extremely basic editing on it…short personal projects with simple cuts, and virtually no filters. I plan to use MPEG Streamclip to convert it to, well, I haven’t decided which codec yet…something simple that can do 16×9 standard definition video for YouTube or even DVD playback.
I’m just wondering what I need to fix on my PC for the absolute least amount of money.
Thanks!
Casey -
3 Replies
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Try playing it in vlc. Mostly it’s probably a function of your CPU. That is a really old box by computer standards. You don’t mention what os your are running, but a gig or two of ram is not very much.
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Oh yeah…it’s the latest Windows XP (SP4 I think).
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That’s not much RAM/GPU so the load is on the CPU as noted.
You could, transcode using CineForm or Streamclip to another codec, which should give you editing headroom, and playback.
I believe that early on one of the luminaries (Dave LaRonde?) from over in the Adobe threads, made it clear that transcoding from h.264 was requisite initially to remove redundancy, I frames only versus reading P and B frames concurrently, because of the dragging on resources.
Just a thought.
Rob
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