May 04, 2005

Curiously Jittery George: When viewing certain .wmv files (okay, a torrent of last night's Daily Show) the picture is very clear but also very jumpy. I've tried viewing with every media player I have... what gives, monkeys?
posted by moonbird 19 years ago
  • define "jumpy".
  • I can't answer your question as I've had to swear off WMV, but I am slow (politically speaking) and have you seen this QuickTime .mov collection? On Lisa Rein's Radar ("Daily Show" clips) I think she posts just about every segment from the show in .mov format eventually. The load times are on par with and as meaningful as the news cycle. I hope somebody enjoys that as it does absolutely nothing to help you solve your problem.
  • It looks as if I'm watching a scene filmed in an earthquake, or people made of Jell-o. No, I'm not taking illicit substances while previewing downloads (at least not at present). The figues within the frame "vibrate" much like educational films from back in the day not being reeled correctly. It's a little hard to explain. I'm up to date (as far as I know) on all my codecs, and I really don't believe this video (and several others of varying programming) were encoded in this way.
  • The problem is, there are several possible points of failure, and you'll need to do some investigation to narrow down the culprit. But as far as file formats go, .wmv is kind of stinky. Does it happen to all .wmv files, or just the one? If you can view other .wmv files without any problems, then maybe you just got a bad rip.
  • Codecs. Download K-lite mega codec pack & install. See if that helps.
  • Jerky playback is usually due to an underpowered cpu or graphics card, especially apparent with higher resolution clips.
  • I'll see your "Lisa Rein's Radar" and raise you Hundreds of clips from the Comedy Central site (minus the annoying ads).
  • I believe zeoslap has the right answer. On my old 450 mhz, I had nothing but trouble with wmv. Winxp has that program Mover maker, that you can encode down any size movie file,mpg,mpeg,avi,wmv, to any size, even a 100mb down to a 1mb,,which is great if your machine can handle it, but others machines might not have the resourses to display it properly. It`s kind of a love/hate situation that MS has presented to us. I hate wmv because they are so hard to encode to another format.
  • wmv? Really? Most of the Daily Show I get is xvid avis. These play fine with BSplayer on my XP laptop (but not on my mac for some reason, probably just need to get the codec).
  • hey moonbird