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Choppy Theora Playback

by Scott Doerrfeld · in Torque Game Engine · 02/17/2006 (2:28 pm) · 9 replies

Has anyone had trouble getting Theora-encoded videos to play smoothly in TGE? My video playback is consistently choppy --- meaning it is choppy in the exact same spots no matter what, regardless of what platform I play it on. The .ogg file plays just fine in a standrad media player. Also, I have used the latest Theora encoder. Any thoughts? Thanks.
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Torque Owner Aaron E
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#1
02/17/2006 (4:56 pm)
Hi Scott,

I haven't had any problems with Theora since 1.4 officially came out. Just curious, are you using 1.4 or a modified 1.3?

Aaron E.

Torque Owner Scott Doerrfeld
#2
02/17/2006 (6:02 pm)
I am using 1.4. I have noticed that the size of the movie makes a difference (i.e. 480 x 360 plays smoother than 720 x 480). However, I always get all sorts of strange artifacts after the movie is finished playing. Don't think it's the encoding, since the movie file plays fine outside the TGE.

Associate Ben Garney
#3
02/17/2006 (6:49 pm)
Are you sure that you have Torque linking against the latest Theora lib? They might have rev'ed it since 1.4 went into the release process.

Torque Owner Scott Doerrfeld
#4
02/18/2006 (10:00 pm)
The latest Theora lib is from August 20, 2005. So I am thinking 1.4 includes the latest Theora.

Torque Owner Scott Doerrfeld
#5
02/20/2006 (6:43 am)
So really.....no one else is having this problem?

Torque Owner Scott Doerrfeld
#6
02/20/2006 (11:59 am)
So really.....no one else is having this problem?

Torque Owner Aaron E
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#7
02/21/2006 (12:35 pm)
Scott,

If you want to send out one of your problematic videos, some of us can try it out in our apps and see if we get similar results. I've got a nice media file picker in my app so I can just drop your video in and test it without having to make any scripting changes.

If that sounds good to you, I can post an e-mail address you can send it to. And some of the others might be willing to do the same. BTW, how big (file size) are your videos? Mine are generally under 10MB in size.

Aaron E.

Torque Owner Panutat Tejasen
#8
02/26/2006 (7:41 pm)
Scott,

I have the same problem. The videos work fine on my laptop. But on other PC they play like one frame per sec. I have no idea what's wrong. I've tried to increase virtual memory, defrag harddisk but no success. The machines specs are modern than my laptop so I don't think that cause the problem.

If you want to try a video. I've upload it here

Torque Owner Scott Doerrfeld
#9
02/28/2006 (10:22 pm)
Panutat, I downloaded your video and experienced the same problems. Played in the engine, it starts getting choppy a few minutes in. In my media player, however, the movie plays smoothly. Really don't know what's going on here. I've tried compressing the videos on different machines (both Mac & PC) as well as playing them back on different machines.

I am using the ffmpeg2theora to compress the videos. It is the one here:

http://www.v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/examples.html

I have also tried converting from several different formats (.dv, .avi. .mpeg, .mov). All with the same results.

:(