Reduce AVI's skipping in VLC

During a break editing today a client decided to show me some of their past projects. They were encoded by someone at some point as .AVI's but they were skipping. While we were watching them she apologized and mentioned that all AVI's seem to skip for her.

So that got me curious and I played the same file with Movist which played back without skipping but I mentioned to her that Movist hasn't been updated for about 8 months so don't rely on it forever. However, the skipping problem was still bothering me in VLC. Checking her console logs I found mentions of first frame isn't a keyframe over and over aligning with the skipping. Not much to do about that as far as I know but there were some delay errors listed as well.

So delving into it's complex array of preferences I found the Caching Value which was set to 300ms. You can get there by hitting COMMAND + , (comma) in VLC and then clicking on the "All" radio button, Access Modules > File. Whew.

At the top you'll see "Caching value (ms)" and some number, likely 300. I just bumped it up to 1000 (1000 ms = 1 sec) and hit save.

The skipping is a lot better but there still is the occasional glitch as well as some very brief audio skips. I'm still not sure what can be done about them since Movist seems to handle the same file on the same hardware without issues. It may be some bug in VLC, I'm just not sure.

VLC for the iPad

VLC is coming to the iPad. Suddenly the iPad seems a lot more handy for dealing with clients.

VLC for Mac Losing Developers

VLC for the Mac may be dead due to lack of active developers.

If you can help out or know someone that can, head over to their developer page.

by Rémi Denis-Courmont on Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:00 pm

There are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS.

As an immediate consequence, the 64-bits releases for MacOS has already been put on hold.
I don't need to mention the stale status of the MacOS user interface.
If it goes on like this, MacOS support may be discontinued as of VLC 1.1.0. There is nobody to make the necessary updates to the MacOS support code, for instance to support the new VLC video output architecture.

Taking into account the learning curve to VLC development, I think it is fair to say that the situation is now critical.

VisualHub Can't Convert .flv Anymore?

A client has handed you (meaning you've used Command + Option + A in Safari to open the Activity Window and downloaded that really cool video from YouTube to email your friends) a .flv that they need in some other format for something or other. Opening it in VLC you see that it's h264/mp4a and VisualHub begets you an error like "Cannot allocate temp picture, check pix fmt"

What do you do? Well, you can try altering the Decoding parameter in VisualHub to be QuickTime or ffmpeg or whatever but your luck will vary. It may just work, or need Perian or may never work. flvs are fussy like that.

Even the power of QuickTime alone won't do it; you need 3x the transcoding power.

A) Install Perian
B) Install MPEG Streamclip.
C) Launch MPEG Streamclip and drag your fussy .flv into it.
D) Export it to H.264 (QuickTime) or the codec of your choice.

See, QuickTime + Perian will PLAY the .flv but when you export it it'll likely be MOS (Mit Out Sound). But, opening it with the power of Perian plus exporting it with the power of MPEG Streamclip will result in a transcoded file with audio.

Yup. You didn't even have to restart :) The only downside is that the resultant file will be 60-70% larger than the original .flv but monkey with the settings in MPEG Streamclip and you can bring that down significantly without very much of a loss in quality at all. The first thing to change is the Data Rate with a lower kbits/s. Also, unless you need really high quality audio, try lowering the audio to 22.050 kHz.

Great, thanks, Mr. Not Bruce, but how do I delete these two apps now?

From Perian's site:

How do I remove Perian?
Open the System Preferences. Select the Perian pane and 'Remove.' Now 'Show All' preference panes, control-click the Perian pane and 'Remove "Perian" Preference Pane.

As for MPEG Streamclip...just drag it to the trash.