slow to open avi

[Zel]

I'm pretty new to OSX, I'm a switcher as of last week, but I was pretty techsavvy before that on Windows.

My question is about loading video files, When I doubleclick on a movie which is an AVI, I get the beachball for almost a full minute.

Because this is a week old 2.4ghz dualcore machine, I expected movies to open faster than they do on my windows box which is a 2.0ghz singlecore.

I'm convinced there is something wrong with my setup, maybe a codec problem, but I dont really understand how Quicktime works. Is there a codec pack I need, or something?

As a second and less important issue, I also cannot drag to import most of my video files into iTunes, only a few work, so I believe it is also a codec problem, that iTunes is not recognizing most of my videofiles (I dont mean WMV, I know better than that, these are all AVI and some work, some dont).

I'd like to load up enough codecs to get this thing working properly, but don;t know where to look.

 

[OutThere]

I'm not sure what codec your movie files are in. Many are available and quicktime can be made to work with most codecs (including WMV). The most popular is probably DivX, which has an official mac codec pack: www.divx.com/divx/mac/


I prefer VLC for playing videos in OS X. It handles anything I can throw at it like a charm.

 

[siurpeeman]

i had the same issue with you, but i was using an older versian of the perian codec. i just downloaded the most recent version found here, and it's loading a lot faster now.

 

[Zel]

Okay, I thought there had to be something wrong, something so obvious that you would know about it

The files play so I do have whatever codec is strictly required, but the problem is that the files takes soo long to do so. It's sitting right there in my Home/Movies folder but takes a full 60 seconds after I doubleclick before I even see Quicktime appear.

Frontrow suffers as well, because when you go into movies it tries to render the thumbnail image before moving into the Movies menu item and this step hangs the system for what feels like an eternity (I keep saying one minute, which is a long long time to stare at a frozen Frontrow menu).

This is why I think there is something wrong. I guess I will get videolan, I've used that on Windows for the occasional odd file format, but it has nothing to do with this slowness problem.

 

[MisterMe]

Okay, I thought there had to be something wrong, something so obvious that you would know about it

The files play so I do have whatever codec is strictly required, but the problem is that the files takes soo long to do so. ...

You could afford to be a little bit more proactive. First, the QuickTime player will give you the formats of your audio and video tracks. Second, it is likely that your videos are slow because you are using a PPC-based codec rather than a Univeral Binary version to play the video.

 

[Zel]

You could afford to be a little bit more proactive. First, the QuickTime player will give you the formats of your audio and video tracks. Second, it is likely that your videos are slow because you are using a PPC-based codec rather than a Univeral Binary version to play the video.

Okay, I didn't know QT would tell me file information, I will look for that..okay MovieInspector says only that it is a GenericMpeg-4 with Mpeg-3 audio. This isnt really codec information, and "show Movie Properties" is grayed out because I havent given them more money.


How can I tell which version of codec I have? The only one I have explicitly downloaded is XviD_Codec-r58 (Intel).component and the one from divx.com which I think they claimed was universal.

Just to check, This time I used a stopwatch (stopwach applet on the ipod), and between doubleclicking and the window first appearing is two minutes eleven seconds. That was with a full length movie, now when I tested this on a 25 minute cartoon (same mpeg-4) the time between doubleclick and video window is two seconds.

There should not be a sixty-times difference, and I dont think there should even be a linear (four times movie length = four times file opening, which would be eight seconds, not 131 seconds).