[vlc] AVC playback bug - more notes

[Francois Grobbelaar]

Sorry, I just want to also check, does someone actually read e-mails 
going to this address? I'd like sort of indication that my e-mail was 
received and didn't just disappear into the void.

In addition to that, here are a few notes I forgot to mention in my 
original e-mail:
1) Most h264 videos play fine, it is just the odd encode every here and 
there that displays this issue
2) It is not a CPU issue - my CPU's barely even being utilized when this 
video is played and I don't have problems decoding h264 videos even at 
1920x1080 resolution (in VLC, which is faster than MPC which does tend 
to lag a bit once I hit that res).
3) I'm running on Windows Vista with my video output set to Direct3D 
(though I doubt that is the reason as then I would have expected more 
videos to have this problem)

I suspect it is just videos output by a specific encoder, but it is 
strange because I thought VLC uses ffmpeg's h264 decoder, which is 
exactly what ffdshow uses, and ffdshow has no problem decoding the files 
that show this behavior under media player classic. It does make me 
wonder if it could be something else, I've tried remuxing the file into 
another mkv container, but it didn't make a difference, I guess it could 
be anything, even audio codec perhaps. Well, please look into it and 
just write back to confirm that you did get the e-mail.


Thanks,
Francois.
p.s. Awesome player :) - thanks for all the time you guys put into it.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	AVC playback bug
Date: 	Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:54:29 +1300
From: 	Francois Grobbelaar <bles at ihug.co.nz>
To: 	vlc at videolan.org



Hello,

Firstly, VLC media player is awesome, I have been really impressed with 
it so far and I really hope it has a long future ahead of it. I'm 
strongly considering switching completely over to it soon (I currently 
use it for playing DVDs and the odd video that doesn't play in media 
player classic - I intend to get a Mac soon and of course at that point 
I will be switching to VLC).

There is one thing that kind of bothers me though. I am a fan of anime 
and I found that some of the h264 encoded videos do not play back 
correctly on VLC (or it could be the mkv container, not sure) - this is 
something I noticed in the 0.96 release and thought would be fixed on 
the newest (0.98a) but it doesn't look like it has been fixed, I also 
don't know how long the problem has been there. Media Player Classic 
running the CCCP codec pack doesn't have the same problem and neither 
does ZoomPlayer. I can't think of a better way for you to see the 
problem other than providing you with a link to an example of what I'm 
talking about (this is a torrent link for an unlicensed anime episode):
http://tracker.anirena.com/download.php?id=12112

You'll notice the issue fairly soon, the video just freezes every few 
seconds and recovers every now and then. It is probably some codec 
feature that is not supported in VLC but is used for some of these 
releases. This is really the only thing currently stopping me from 
making VLC my default media player for everything.


Thanks, you guys have a great project on your hands,
Francois.