Fast forward and rewind: anybody know the real story? (1 Viewer)

[ckcomm]

I have a longstanding problem with the Fast Forward and Rewind functions in MediaPortal - the actual video picture only advances at 2x speed - at all other higher speeds, a freeze frame is displayed, making it difficult to know when to stop fast forwarding/rewinding.

Periodically, someone posts a question about this issue in this forum. The response is usually either: a) it's a problem with the codec; or b) MediaPortal simply doesn't handle Fast Forward and Rewind well.

My own experience suggests that neither of these answers is entirely accurate. I find that there is no variation in this behavior from one codec to the next, but that different PCs behave quite differently (even when using the same video card).

My recently retired 3 year-old Dell machine (2.4 GHz CPU, 2GB RAM) worked beautifully - fast forward and rewind tracked quite well, up to 16x and beyond.

I have two much newer HP machines that only track at 2x speed - at all other speeds there's just a freeze frame. One of them is a dual-core 3GHz machine with 3 GB RAM. It came with onboard video, but I cannibalized my old Dell for its GeForce 8400 video card - in part, because I was hoping the videocard might be the reason the Dell worked so well.

No such luck - even though this machine has a higher CPU speed, 2 cores, more RAM and THE EXACT SAME VIDEO CARD with the same driver version, it still exhibits the same problem. I made sure everything else was the same as the Dell too: same version of MediaPortal, exact same version of the same codec, playing the same video file (which in each case is on the PC's local drive).

Given that the new machine has so much more power, it doesn't seem logical that it CAN'T properly Fast Forward and Rewind at high speeds (besides, other apps like PowerDVD can, even using the same codec).

Perhaps MediaPortal just THINKS it can't so it's not trying?

Does anyone know if there's something I'm missing here? Some setting that controls MediaPortal's FF/Rew behavior perhaps?

This seems like such an essential function that I am surprised by how few postings there are on this subject - is this working properly for most folks out there?

I'm genuinely stumped, and this is an important feature to me - if I can't get it working, I guess it's back to Windows Media Center for me (shudder).

Any insights would be appreciated - thanks in advance!

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

This is a toughie

Althought 2x speed can give the "squirrel effect" have no other problem tracking through any video file i own, so trying to pinpoint the error you are getting may be down to renderer\codec as you checked out first as the cause.

Can you confirm that you know exactly what codecs are being used, whilst playing file, logs would be appreciated with this, especially if they provide graphedit details of codec\renderer.

Regards

 

[geov]

A few words from me on this....

I have recently switched over to Vista, why because of the exact same problem on XP...which I never could sort out. I did track it down to two things before switching over to Vista.

1st...I started having the problem after installing XP SP3...before that with XP SP2 I had no problem. I proved this by uninstalling SP3, after which FFW and RW worked perfectly...then reinstall SP3 and the problem came back.

2nd...With XP SP3 the problem disappeared if I switched HW-acceleration off. This made me think that it could be a graphics-driver that was incompatible with XP SP3...and tried installing different driver versions for my ATI card...but all the drivers I tried had the same problem with XP SP3.

 

[VdR]

That saves me from trying to find out why that broke! Indeed around the time of the SP3 update ... I too have an ATI graphics card. The latest recommended ATI driver does not work at all with it.

Thank you.

VdR