5D MKII FILE PLAYER FOR PC tip
 

I recently loaded Powerdvd 9 and total media theater for Blu-ray playing on my PC. Noticed they said they played back AVCHD.
Lo and Behold! beautiful smooth playback of native MKii footage, but no sound, haven't figured that out yet.

Nothing else I have tried has played these files smoothly.

jh

I transcode everything to Cineform using NeoScene. With the free player software installed, Windows Media Player works great.

Sure, I have to transcode the files, but given that the original files aren't good for editing, I transcode every keeper anyway.

This is obviously a Windows only problem as the 5DII files play perfectly on all our Macs (except the eight year old iMAC G3:-) that includes a couple of laptops. I would have thought that any modern PC with a reasonable graphics card should play the native files OK but of course you do need the correct CODECs. VLC plays most things with its own decoders & any player that can use one of the FFmpeg packs should be OK.

Have VLC, codec packs etc., still stuttering playback. the two programs mentioned smooth as butter, fast way for me now to tell which ones are keepers on my 30" dell screen before transcoding for edit with Neo.

Macs are better natively for some things I guess. I like the $100 software solution vs a $2-3k mac solution to this issue.

jh

I have used PowerDVD as the only way to get BBC HD playing smoothly on a Windows Media Center system. CoreAVC which is just a CODEC & much cheaper is another option for Windows it is very efficient & now that it offloads some of the decoding to the hardware on Nvidia graphics cards it is even more efficient.

For VLC playback of 5DmkII files on Windows, do this:

http://www.snappertalk.com/index.php...back-with-vlc/

...for other applications see if there are any settings along the lines of disabling deblocking filters - deblocking filters improve playback quality somewhat but are very processor-intensive, hence the jerky motion when your CPU can't keep up.

PowerDVD works well because (I think) it is able to offload H.264 decoding onto the video card, same with CoreAVC codec, instead of only using the CPU... assuming you have a video card compatible with its GPU-acceleration.