Forums > Jitter

playing very hi-res video on windows xp machine


Nadav Assor
Aug 15 2009 | 3:48 pm

Hi,
I’m working on a project which involves playing a hi-res video through 4 displays via triplehead2go from a pc running max 5.
My current issue is the age-old question of optimal settings- codec etc. – for best performance. My goal is to play a 5120X720 pixels clip at 30fps, on this windows box.

On a rather slow dual core G5 (1.86GHz) this works great using Apple Intermediate codec + Vade’s GPU optimized playback patches.

On my pc however, an intel core 2 duo 2.5ghz with 3.25 RAM and Nvidia 9800, running xp service pack 3, it achieves 9 fps at most using photo jpeg (as Apple Intermediate doesn’t work on windows). Tried motion jpeg B , H.264 as well. Even worse. What to do? I really don’t want to downscale the resolution – it seems the specs are not an issue so what is?

many thanks,
Nadav


Rob Ramirez
Aug 15 2009 | 4:47 pm

without any experience choosing codecs for windows, all i can say is to try Animation codec.


Nadav Assor
Aug 15 2009 | 5:22 pm

Thanks Rob. I did try Animation, it currently is super slow even on my mac, (too high data rate?) and as we’re talking about around 1.5 hours of footage, the files it makes are just too huuuge to be practical..
Another test I did was to bang a jit.noise object of the same dimensions I want my movie to be- I got 20-23fps. If I could at least approach that with the video, that would be great.

maybe it just can’t be done on this machine. sigh.


Rob Ramirez
Aug 15 2009 | 5:33 pm

that’s unfortunate. adam kendall posted a little bit ago about getting better performance on windows by downgrading to quicktim 6.5 or something. check for that post, cause not sure about the details.

maybe try splitting up your movies too?


Adam Kendall
Aug 15 2009 | 8:00 pm

I based that on 320×240 photo-jpg. I didn’t do too much testing. I had been using QT 6.5 / XP for years, upgraded to Max 5/Jitter 1.7., upgraded to whatever the latest version of QT was at the time, notice subtly jittery movie playback in Jitter and QT itself, downgraded to 6.5, and the problem went away. For all I know the better performance in 6.5 was coincidental, maybe there was some other problem that fixed itself.

NYU Poly has (had?) 9 XP machines running Jitter with single outputs, and when I used them, they could all run high-def video very well with the H264 codec. 8 machines had no audio, but the 9th machine had audio and could still play back the high-def H264 files no-problem. They absolutely choked on the DV codec. I know it worked with Max 4.x / Jitter 1.6. I don’t remember if we did it in Max 5 / Jitter 1.7.

If Josh Goldberg is reading this, he should jump in. I *think* he said he’s had better performance doing multi-output on PCs vs. Macs, but maybe I don’t remember it correctly.

Well, this is a long post that probably doesn’t help you…


Nadav Assor
Aug 15 2009 | 9:26 pm

Thanks Adam and Rob. I tried the 6.5 downgrade just now. It actually performed significantly worse (again, just for my frame size, didn’t do a complete test).

So back in 7.6, and the other thing I tried is downscaling the dimensions to 2/3 of original- now it’s about 3410X480 (photojpeg) – and things got even weirder…

this is being run in a very erratic way by jitter: on the first run I got around 20fps. After restarting the patch and trying again, I keep getting anything between 9-12fps.

The main difference noticeable between the two runs: on the first one the cpu usage went up to around 99% – which I don’t mind as long as it gives good fps, which it did. But on the second, slow run, the cpu wouldn’t go above 35-55% (this is both cpus combined).

???

I’m baffled.

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