Thursday, January 7, 2010

Playing video files on Media Player

Stand alone media players are now becoming very popular and recently I had the opportunity to test run some HD2000 videos on two media players, one the Western Digital WDTV and the other, the Sony PS3. OK, the PS3 is not exactly a media player but many people use it as such in addition as a game machine. Below are the results and since I do not know which version of firmware both units have, this may not be the latest but just a guide. Both were connected to a HDTV with HDMI cable.

For both players, I used a test video each shot with the HD2000 in the following resolutions.

1. Full HR, 1920x1080, 60p
2. Full HD, 1920x1080, 60i and
3. Full SHQ, 1920x1080, 30p


First the PS3. Both the 30p and 60i video played without problem. When it came to the 60p, the video played smoothly but at a lower speed; roughly it was at one and a half times meaning a 2 minute clip played for 3 minutes and thus the video played as slow-motion. The audio played correctly at the normal speed and so the audio finished ahead of the video and is out of sync. The last third of the video played in silence.

What about the WDTV? As in the case of the PS3, both the 30p and 60i videos played correctly. There was also problem playing the 60p video. In this case the video played correctly most of the time but at certain intervals, the picture breaks while the audio started playing OK but soon became jerky and finally became dead.

Thus the 60p videos cannot be handled correctly by both the WDTV and the PS3 and I wonder if there are any media players out there that can play these videos properly. Any users with such a player should leave your comments here for all to share.

So if you intend to make use of the WDTV or PS3 to view your HD2000 videos, shoot at the lower resolution of 60i or 30p. For normal video for casual viewing, there is not much noticeable difference from the 60p. You will also save some file space and will have less headache using external editing software. After all, other consumer camcorders only offer 60i or 30p as their highest resolution.

Ronald Kwok
http://ronaldkwok.atomicblog.hop.clickbank.net/

9 comments:

  1. hey Ronald, Thanks for your great posts, they relly help to get to know the HD 2000, I had a big problem in running the 1920x1080 with 60P, however after i did not a little more research i found this CCCP codec which will allow you to run HD files smoothly without break or flicker in the clip. I hope this helps, here where i got the codec
    pack from http://cccp-project.net/


    -Faris

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Ronald,
    I've been looking to play my clips on TV attached media player too, so your post about WDTV and PS3 was very helpful.

    I own Iomega ScreenPlay Pro HD (unfortunately bought prior to buying my sanyo hd2000), which can't play the sanyo's native .mp4 (encoded in h.264) files at all. So, I'm having to convert them to divx HD, using the divx converter. The converted files play on the ScreenPlay fine and to the naked eye the quality is the same. However, doing the conversion for every clip is a major pain, so I'm looking for a media player that would be able to play the Full HR, 1920x1080, 60p clips without any problems.

    The ones I need to try are:
    - xbox 360
    - WDTV Live (newer version of WDTV)
    - Popcorn hour

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Faris, thanks for the link but I'm a bit worried about running the file.........Maybe it is the name, CCCP, lol!

    Hi Petr, please share your experience after trying those media players. You should also try Patriot Box Office since I read some very good reviews on it. But I got a feeling that none of them can play a FullHR video without problem, hope I can be proven wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fortunately two guys at work have Popcorn hour and here are the results:

    Popcorn hour C-200: plays full HD perfectly fine
    Popcorn hour A-110: can't, the picture is fine, but the sound is stuttered

    Trouble is C-200, is about £300, which is a lot of money.

    Anyone tried the WDTV Live?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Petr, thanks for sharing your results. Glad that there is a media player that can play the Full HD video but sad that it costs 300 quids! Think I'll just stick with 60i or 30p until something cheaper comes along.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've had a look at the Patriot Box Office and it looks pretty good, but testing it out is going to be a problem.

    ReplyDelete
  7. HI guys,

    Note that 1080 @ 60p is almost impossible to play natively because of it high data rate. This is one of the main reasons most cameras don't have this option, I have had success with 720 @60p but unfortunately this cam does not offer. The highest data rate that broadcasting stations broadcast at is 1080 @60i. For the same reason.
    If I wanted to shoot a whole video @ 60p, I would shoot it at 60p, edit it in 60p, then export it @ 720 @ 60p, so I will be able to play it everywhere, and so will others.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Just tested out some 60p stuff,it won't even run great in my editors, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and Final Cut Pro, doesn't even have an option for 1080 60p, I'm going to run a test on my friends computer, he has a Core i7 and 12gb of ram, just to see if it'll run

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Nathan, thanks for sharing and do keep us informed. I tried playing the 60p files on some media players demo units and they seems to work. These include the Asus O!Play and the Hornettek Phantom (same as the Patriot Box Office). So it seems those media players using the latest Realtek 1073DD chip can handle these 60p videos. Can readers out there that have such media players confirm this? I'll be getting one soon to do a full testing.

    ReplyDelete