Monday, January 5, 2009

Further info on playing AVCHD

I've had a chance to test this on several computers now and can make the following clarifications and improvements to the suggested procedure.

NOTES
  • You need at least a ~2.4 GHz processor. It doesn't playback correctly on my 1.9 GHz whereas it plays-back with spare cpu cycles on my 2.7 GHz AMD X2, as well as on a 2.7 GHz Intel Core2.
  • The existing 0.9.4 version (in the standard repository) plays AVCHD just as good as the newer "1.0~git" nightly. So there's no need to go through uninstalling, adding the 'nightly' repository etc. But you may still need to reset the configuration files.
  • The UI on the 1.0 version has a lot of bugs, so it's preferable to use 0.9.4 in that regard.
TWEAKS
There are 3 changes you should make in the configuration:
  1. in Tools > Preferences, under Instances, enable "Allow only one instance".
  2. Click on Show Settings:All (radio button in bottom-left). Under Input/Codecs > Other > FFmpeg,
    set "Skip loop filter for h.264" = ALL
  3. under Video > Filters, on the right-side screen, scroll down the page to the second listing (for Video Output Filter Modules) and enable "Deinterlacing video filter"
That last change re deinterlacing will cause VLC to default to "Discard" mode which uses the least CPU. If you have CPU cycles to spare, of course, you could then go down into the Filters > Deinterlace settings and select a better mode.
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1 comment:

willie said...

you rock!!! this actually works! i searched and searched for this. yay! thank you! thank you!