5D MKII PC Playback - Good Solution Found!

[Rick Hill]

This may be old news here. My search here didn't come up with anything so if this is a old news, I apologize in advance.

I've had a _lot_ of issues trying to play back my 5D .mov files on my computer systems. Nothing I tried would result in clean playback without stutter (even the Zoombrowser EX - which played the files the best - stuttered a little). I even started transcoding my files using TMPGenc but I am very dissapointed in the resulting files outside of the original 5D files. This is not the right solution long term. I am also very disappointed to read other "media players" have various issues (ok video, no audio, etc.).

I have an HTPC driving my HDTV display setup at 1920x1080 so PC playback has the potential to let me see my material in the best possible untouched resolutions. I have used VLC player for many years and was disappointed (very surprised) it couldn't handle these files.

Well then I found this advice (from: http://www.snappertalk.com/index.php...back-with-vlc/). Hopefully it's ok to re-post the text quoted from the link here:

"The Canon EOS 5D MkII can shoot video in either 640×480 (VGA) or 1920×1080 (1080P, Full HD) resolution, both encoded with H.264 video compression. Playing video files in the former is easy, but the sheer amount of data that needs to be processed with 1920×1080 resolution can tax even quite modern computers.
VLC has been my video player of choice for many years as it is free, open-source, and will play virtually everything you can throw at it – but disappointingly I couldn’t get it to play 5D MkII videos without major stuttering or no playback at all.

Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:

Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC

I’ve tried it on Windows and all the 5DmkII videos that were problematic before now play perfectly. I would imagine it would also work on Mac."

And now VLC plays back my 5D files clean as a whistle!

Now how to figure out how to do native file editing (no re-encoding except transitions/effects).

[Mark Hahn]

Yes, that has been noted before, but it deserves mentioning often. On another forum people posted over and over that there was no way to play the files on their PC. I posted the instructions that you just did over and over again. I finally gave up.

You forgot one important point. They need to pick up the latest copy of VLC. This trick has only worked in the last few versions.

[Marcus Marchesseault]

I had 5DII files playing nicely in Media Player Classic by re-installing the latest quicktime but it mysteriously started getting jumpy again. I may try re-installing MPC but for now VLC is working perfectly thanks to your advice. Don't give up on giving good advice. Of course, some of this stuff might be a good sticky post.

[Luis de la Cerda]

With coreavc even a lowly 1.3 ghz subnotebook can handle 5D files relatively smooth :)

[Rick Hill]

Originally Posted by Luis de la Cerda

With coreavc even a lowly 1.3 ghz subnotebook can handle 5D files relatively smooth :)

I'll give it a try. You can download a free 14 day trial.

Clearly VLC gives up something in quality for the speed up. I am seeing lots of banding in flat areas like blue sky, etc.

FYI, here's coreavc requirements:

1080p video at 24-30 frames per second
CPU - 2.8 GHz or faster Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD processor
RAM - At least 1GB of RAM
GPU - 256MB or greater video card
OS - Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Rick Hill

FYI, here's coreavc requirements:

1080p video at 24-30 frames per second
CPU - 2.8 GHz or faster Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD processor
RAM - At least 1GB of RAM
GPU - 256MB or greater video card
OS - Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista

Without defining exactly what the bit rate of the 1080p video is those specifications are not a lot of use. For example I know from experience of using CoreAVC that to play H.264 files as transmitted on the BBC HD satellite channel that are 1080p at about 16Mbps that you need a dual core processor. I doubt that Canon 5DII files at 40+Mbps would be any easier to decode.

[Bill Binder]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Without defining exactly what the bit rate of the 1080p video is those specifications are not a lot of use. For example I know from experience of using CoreAVC that to play H.264 files as transmitted on the BBC HD satellite channel that are 1080p at about 16Mbps that you need a dual core processor. I doubt that Canon 5DII files at 40+Mbps would be any easier to decode.

Both CoreAVC with Media Player Classic and also VLC play 5D2 files fine for me on a significantly old PC.

[Mark Hahn]

Originally Posted by Luis de la Cerda

With coreavc even a lowly 1.3 ghz subnotebook can handle 5D files relatively smooth :)

What does relative mean? It either drops frames or it doesn't. I could make that claim about all my players.

[Luis de la Cerda]

Relatively meaning not 100% real time, but almost. It slows down instead of dropping frames. With the skip deblocking option it manages around 15fps, which is extremely impressive for a notebook that barely keeps up with DV files and can't handle HD vimeo streams. :)

In case you're interested, it's a 1.2ghz pentium M vaio txn17 notebook. No dual cores, intel gma 945 graphics, etc... I was convinced it would never be able to handle any video stream that would take advantage of the very nice 1366 x 768 panel until I tried coreavc. HD vimeo stutters, so does HD youtube, HD wmv and HD quicktime are a slideshow, but with coreavc, it handles almost any h.264 stream I can throw at it.

Fwiw, on a macbook pro 2.3 running winxp it handles real time playback with the processor at around 56% and absolutely no skips.

[Gregory Storm]

Rick -

That worked perfectly. Thanks for the helpful information.

Gregory