Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Jerky XviD Playback?
Iain Laskey solves a frustrating problem with XviD playback
I recently had an annoying problem. I had a number of video files which played back very badly. Most of the time I have no problem playing back such files but these ones were really jerky. Either they'd been encoded badly or playback was missing a huge number of frames. The former was unlikely so clearly something was amiss with playback. More curious, this was happening on two different machines. One had an AMD Athlon 2600 and the other an Athlon 1800 so they should both have been up to the job.
Initially, I needed to be sure I had the right playback CODEC. A CODEC is a program that decodes a video or audio file so it can be played on a machine. I fired up my favourite tool for such jobs, GSpot which can be downloaded free from (www.headbands.com/gspot/) It might have a suspect name but it is a neat tool which interrogates a file to tell you exactly which CODECs were used to create it. It even tries to render a short burst, just to be sure, before confirming what it has found. In this instance, GSpot indicated the popular Xvid CODEC had been used.
XviD is available directly from the developers (www.xvid.org) as source code only so I needed to track down a precompiled version suitable for Windows XP. A quick Google found www.koepi.org from where I downloaded a suitable version.
Thinking it was a done job, I fired up the video again. Playback was still jerky, if anything even worse. Could it be driver related? My video drivers were pretty up to date so probably not and non Xvid files worked fine. I did a little digging and found a note that the subsystem that goes between the CODEC and DirectX, the video engine on the PC, was less than optimal. To help fix this, a replacement has been developed called ffdshow. This can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow and is another free tool. What kind people there are out there in developer land!
Once installed, I tried the video clip again with baited breath. Success! The output was vastly better - much smoother.
It does seem a number of people have had problems with jerky playback from XviD files. Whilst this fix may not work for everyone, it should be one of the first things you do try once you've ensured all other drivers and CODECs are up to date.
