Playing mkv on slow computer

When playing mkv file in mplayer or vlc, sometimes (especially when some other process starts working), the play looses its quality. Audio plays ok but video pauses and hangs.

What can I do to make the play smooth. I don't care much about video quality but the play should be smooth. Is there any player, which automatically adjusts depending on the amount of cpu and memory available.

PS : I usually convert mkv to avi using ffmpeg. I was wondering if there is a player (or some settings in mplayer and vlc) which I can set to make play fast). Also conversion often results in very bad sync in audio and video stream.

Dilawar

Posted 2013-04-08T13:57:13.673

Reputation: 205

Conversion to AVI will most certainly degrade the visual quality. Is your PC just too slow, w.r.t hardware? Does it work with, say, MP4 files, or are just MKV files slow to play? – slhck – 2013-04-08T14:01:12.553

@slhck It really not that slow. But I can't play mkv file smoothly. I am using linux (ubuntu). It has i3 processor and 4gb ram. – Dilawar – 2013-04-08T14:10:51.220

It sounds like your processor and memory isn't good enough to play some of the HD content your attempting to view. A i3 is pretty poor depending on the revision 4GB isn't acceptable in today's computing world. – Ramhound – 2013-04-08T15:02:02.717

You are going to experience frame drops and loss of sync if your hardware's not good enough. If PotPlayer can't help (ignore the weird name) at least a little bit, I doubt anything can. – Karan – 2013-04-08T15:18:26.797

Go into VLC in advanced settings and (Input & codec) turn GPU acceleration ON. Assuming it isn't on already and your video card supports it things will be a lot better. – cybernard – 2013-04-08T22:25:19.623

Answers

I had your same issue on a Asus EEEBox, which if I remember well was sold with TotalMedia Theatre 3.5 preinstalled. Such piece of software works well with mkv video, where VLC, MPC, Pot, KM-players and others fails. Unfortunately it does not allow to choose the track audio, and to do fast forwarding and rewinding. After a long time I installed Kody and its video player works very well without any flaw.

Toc

Posted 2013-04-08T13:57:13.673

Reputation: 1 663

As you have been a user here for quite a while, you should be aware of the following. However, maybe you should re-read the linked posts to refresh your memory. -§- Please read How do I recommend software in my answers? paying particular attention to the items in bold. After doing so, please edit your answer so it follows the guidelines.

– robinCTS – 2018-08-11T16:03:06.157

Further to Crazy Buddy's answer, have a look at using CoreAVC in conjunction with MPC-HC (or even MPC-BE, a fork of the project). CoreAVC, while a commercial solution, includes a rendering engine that is unmatched by VLC or codecs included with the CCCP.

If you go this route, you'll need to load the CoreAVC .ax files (codec files) in the External Filters section of MPC, and you'll need to set it to "prefer". Here is a seudo-example I found on the web: enter image description here

brandonscript

Posted 2013-04-08T13:57:13.673

Reputation: 536