monline

The official list of changes of the 10.5.5 update contains the following in the "General" section: addresses stability issues with video playback, processor core idling, and remote disc sharing for MacBook Air. Unfortunately it seems that something got broken in this "fix". My VLC player started to produce lags/delays/hangs during playback of movies (it's happening independently of the movie's format/encoding). I tried to play with the File access module's cache size, but it didn't fix it (since the problem lies deeper). Quicktime works though so I'm not left completely in the cold. I tried to find some info on this issue with Google, but no similiar reports turned up yet. I also tried to upgrade VLC from 0.8.6i to the current latest version (0.9.2), but that didn't help either. Hopefully Apple's going to fix this soon.

I tried to test the performance of Parallels Desktop 3.0 by comparing the playback quality (lost frames) of the HD version of the second trailer of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (this a Quicktime MOV of 1920x816 resolution). Of course the playback was flawless in Mac OS X using VLC. However in the virtual machine I could not watch it using any sort of DirectX rendering. I tried all possible DirectX rendering options of Media Player Classic and non of them worked (got only sound, no video). I tried to use Windows Media Player, but (as described in a previous post) the whole virtual machine went crazy. Then I tried (for the first time) the Windows version of VLC. I could not get any video using the DirectX output options with this one either, but the OpenGL and the "Windows GDI" output modules worked. With OpenGL I could watch the trailer in full-screen and without any single frame loss! However the playback showed small glitches here and there, but it was almost not noticable. I'm quite impressed ... didn't expect this to tell the truth. But Parallels should really get these DirectX bugs fixed. It's not enough if some games work well ... they should not hack DirectX support, but do it the "right way" so all DirectX capable apps work just as in a "real" Windows.

I've already found out how to use VLC to play Quicktime videos. Now I've faced some issues with WMV files. VLC did not play the WMV properly (it showed some "noise" instead of the real content), neither did any other player (like Kaffeine, Xine, Mplayer). For Xine I had to set the video output from "auto" to "xshm". For Mplayer I had to choose the "X11" video setting (this can be set globally in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf).

On Windows I got used to watching Quicktime videos in the browser, either by using Apple's Quicktime or by installing Quicktime Alternative. On Debian/Ubuntu you've several options for Quicktime playback in the browser ... just as if you wanted to do it on a downloaded file. You can use an Mplayer plugin or a VLC plugin. The latter is called mozilla-plugin-vlc so to put it up you just have to execute the apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc command. This'll install the VLC player too if it was not yet on your system.

I've just tried VLC on Mac OS X. After install it constantly crashed for all video files that I tried it with. The cure was to delete the "$HOME/Library/Preferences/org.videolan.vlc.plist" file and the "$HOME/Library/Preferences/VLC" directory. After that everything worked just fine. I'm not sure, but it might be possible that these preference files were already created during install and somehow they were wrong.