Tip: Choppy playback of video on computer from Canon 7D
Jan 24, 2010 Photography
I had previously been rather disappointed with the quality of video playback from the video that the Canon 7D takes. When I would open the videos using VLC player or any other media players I have installed the video would be all choppy. After doing some searching I came to the conclusion that it was more than likely my slower compact flash (CF) card which is a 4GB 133x card which only operates at 20.0 MB/s. Since CF cards now go up to 667x (100 MB/s) I thought this is a very plausible situation. I now have a new 16GB 400x (60 MB/s) card waiting to come in the mail to see how much that helps. However, after taking some spur of the moment video of some friends kids while over at my house and previewing the video on the camera the video played back just fine. With this new information I started doing even more searching and I found this tip on how to have smooth playback in VLC and it seems to work rather well.
Step 1: Open VLC player and navigate to the Tools menu and select Preferences.
Step 2: In the lower left corner of the Preferences dialog box change Show Settings from “Simple” to “All”.
Step 3: Then navigate to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and change the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding” from “none” to “all”
Now try to play your video back again and see the difference.
When you hover your mouse over this select option it says:
Skipping the loop filter (aka deblocking) usually has a detrimental effect on quality. However it provides a big speedup for high definition streams.
Now you can enjoy smooth playback of your video from your Canon 7D DSLR.
July 24th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Thanks – did the trick.