AVC 1920×1080 video does not play smooth

[Davd Keator]

Sounds like a codec issue from the default stuff that comes with Win7. Now ufortunately it’s not recomended to but FFDSHOW does have a good set. Many claim that it can adversely affect Vegas’s built in codecs. I have not seen this issue.

A simple test: Down load VLC player, it’s free and it’s codecs do not interfere with VEGAS. See if your vids play back better…

Either use that player or download the FFDSHOW set.

Good Luck.

[Jan Erik sether]

The VLC player was amongst those I tried earlier.
Repeated the test this morning, and the result is even worse than Windows 7 media player.

I did also download and install FFDSHOW, but I din’t find it obvious how to use it. What should I do ??

Jan Erik

[Dave Haynie]

Most players in Windows will use the AVC decoder with the highest priority. You might want to get one of those Direct-X analysis tools, to make sure you don’t have something evil as the highest priority decoder for AVC. Prior to Windows 7, Microsoft didn’t support AVC themselves, but they really seem to have done it well in Windows 7. Older CODECs (did you install software from Sony, perhaps) don’t use the latest video acceleration APIs. And if you have installed one of those “every CODEC in the world” downloads (eg, K-Lite, etc)… uninstall it right away. It’s more likely to mess things up than to help.

I see there’s a suggestion of VLC. VLC will use other tools to deliver AVC decoding, not the Windows multimedia system (eg, it’s “built-in”), but it’s also not very well tuned… it is really choppy on high definition in general, AVC in particular, on most systems compared to even the built-in Windows 7 AVC CODEC. It doesn’t do modern levels of GPU acceleration. You’re probably going to want GPU acceleration to play back AVC well on a 2 core machine at 2.4GHz (should be possible without, but you’ll be near the limit of CPU).

On my 4-core system at 2.83GHz, I’m seeing 40-60% CPU and choppy playback on 1080/60p video using VLC, smooth as silk playback in Windows Media Player using the built-in AVC decoder… about 12% CPU. Microsoft’s decoder uses DVXA 2.0 video acceleration.

As an alternate, try “Splash Lite”, which seems to have its own built-in AVC decoding, and also uses GPU acceleration, and delivers TV-quality video on systems I’ve used. Using either Microsoft’s AVC decoder or Splash Lite, I can play 1080/60p videos on my laptop… a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz, a bit slower than that i5 (and the GPU is a nVidia 8600M, also a bit slower). That’s over twice the decoding complexity of a 1080/50i video. It’s not your PC, it’s definitely your hardware.

Another question: how well do the video clips from directly from the camera play? The HF-S21 is encoding in AVC as well, so you should be able to play these just as well as the output video files.

-Dave

[Jan Erik sether]

Thanks for your thorough answer.
To answer your question, the clips from the HF S21 actually plays perfect in Windows 7 media player. Even dragging the position bar back and fourth causes
no problems, video continues perfect.

So I really don’t understand why importing the clips to Vegas 10 and then
(just for test) doing no editing but simply making a continuous video to a
m2ts file 1920×1080 50i should make the output behave so badly in many video players.

I will be grateful for more answers that possibly could solve my problem.

Thanks !

Jan Erik

[Dave Haynie]

I did a couple of experiments on my system. I rendered a short video segment to AVCHD at 50i… not something I’d normally do, but what the hell.

So yeah… in WMV, I’m seeing it kind of shakey and stuttery once you get a couple minutes in, or if you seek into the file. Never seen this on any video format before, at least not on this hardware.

This doesn’t happen in Splash Lite.. which of course, isn’t using the Windows MPEG-2 TS splitter.

I re-rendered to an MP4 wrapper, same template otherwise (mine was actually AVCHD in 1920×1080/50i). None of these issues are present.

I’m guessing it’s related to the specifics of how Vegas is creating the MPEG-2 Transport Stream, since you don’t see this directly on your camcorder video, which really ought to have the same behavior (same CODEC, same wrapper). It could be a bug in Sony’s MPEG-2 TS creation, it could be a bug in Microsoft’s (at least, I think I’m using Microsoft’s) splitter.

-Dave

[Jan Erik sether]

Splash Lite played the m2ts file better than Windows media player.
Not perfect though, sliding the position bar worked almost ok, video played
smooth after 4-5 sec. but now audio became very choppy for the next 20 seconds, but after that it was OK.

Did also check CPU load when playing the clips from the Canon HF S21, and
the video made by Vegas. In both cases avarage CPU load was 6-7 % with peaks up to 12 %

Jan Erik

[Dave Haynie]

Try re-muxing the Sony output. The MPEG-2 transport stream can be rebuilt without any change to the video or audio sections, but this seems to fix the problems I saw in the Sony-muxed version.

Go to https://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html, download the tsMuxeR program. You can drop the Sony output file into this, then select the specifics, such as Blu-Ray or AVCHD output. The program actually creates a formatted AVCHD directory… so this can not only mux your AVC properly, but create the files you need if you’re interested in building an AVCHD DVD (I don’t recall if you said just why you’re making AVCHD output, rather than Blu-Ray or generic MP4).

-Dave

[Jan Erik sether]

Thanks for your advice, I will try it.

Yes, I would make .mp4 if Vegas allowed my too, but every time I have tried
( 4 time now I think) the program stop running.

What I do is:
1. select Sony AVV and template AVCHD 1920×1080 50i
2. Click “Advanced render”, Click “Custom” and then “System” to select mp4
file format. It never fails. Vegas stops every time.

Jan Erik

[Jan Erik sether]

Dave,

tsMuxeR worked fine !!

Thanks very much for your assistance !

Jan Erik