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jademcquade
05-08-2007, 03:00 PM
Hi guys.

Ok. I have an avi which is 791MB and 30 seconds long. It is a render of a scene from Lightwave 3D.

When WMP loads the clip it does not play through smoothly first time. The playback stutters and usually it takes a few plays to give a smooth playback.

I was wondering if anyone else has this problem with Media Player and if installing more RAM to my machine would help.

I have 1GB Ram on my XP 3.4Ghz machine. I also have Adobe After Effects, Virtual Dub and 3 Internet Explorer windows open at the same time as Media Player.

If anyone has experience of this or advice to give that would would be great.
aglick
05-08-2007, 04:42 PM
This may be a hard drive throughput issue.

If you are using a single IDE or SATA drive and it is nearly full, the read speed may not support the 23MB/s that your file is requiring to play smoothly. That may be the cause of the glitchiness you are experiencing.

After it's been played once, it is "cached" in memory, and would likely play back smoothly...

You might benchmark your drive(s) and make sure they can support whatever datarates you are wanting to play back...rememeber that all hard drives slow down dramatically towards the end of their capacity.

Uncompressed 640x480 would be right about 23MB/s. Is that the resolution you rendered at?

Uncompressed NTSC (720x486) is closer to 30MB/s and uncompressed 1080i HD is about 240MB/s.

You may want to invest in a RAID card and some new drives if you're going to be playing back uncompressed frames or files...


My .02$


Adam
BOXX Labs
jademcquade
05-08-2007, 05:32 PM
Yep the resolution was indeed 640x480 uncompressed.

I think you are right about the hard drive slowing down as it comes towards the end of its capacity. I have a 200GB SATA drive on C and another same capacity drive on D. The file is stored on C which only has 20 GB left.

I have moved the AVI in question over to the D drive which has 180GB left and it plays smoothly first time.

Thanks for the advice. I will need to clear some of the junk off my C drive.
tfortier
05-12-2007, 06:50 AM
you can save in qt animation codec at 100%, it give you uncompress and play well in quicktime... or do like me, compress in qt jpegB 75% or 100% for playback purpose but deliver the final uncompress...
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