Problem with Long pauses in DT quicktime movies?

[DeepPurple]

Hi I'm having problems when watching digital tutor movie files (which i really love)

The problem is when i want to skip a section of the video or click back to re-watch pieces the video takes ages to scan through or somthing, so im sat around waiting like 30 seconds just to re-watch a small part of the clip, which is really annoying.

I've got all the codecs installed etc, and i've tried playing the movie files in different players... quicktime, vlc, explorer etc.

Cheers for any info
Alec

[danlefeb]

A lot of that can have to do with your internet connection speed. When you scrub through the a streaming video, it can take some time to pick up your position...the slower the internet connection, the longer it'll take.

[tanya]

Hi Alec,

Are you talking about videos on our website or on the CD-ROM?

[DeepPurple]

Not from the net, from DT CD or from my Hard disk.
Is it just the quicktime format thats a bit bad?

[tanya]

What training kit is it?

It all depends on the size of the QuickTime movie, the speed of your computer / graphics card...

From personal experience, it is easier to scrub from beginning to end, then from end to beginning. So, you might just want to go to the beginning of the movie and scrub from there.

[DeepPurple]

Cheers, its jut the female android kit, but its the same on my other ones.

Its odd, becase it doesnt happen on some of my other Non-DT quicktime files or other video formats.

[danlefeb]

Other QT files you're playing off of a CD?

[tanya]

Actually, compression of the video has a lot to do with it as well. The more compressed, the harder it is to scrub.

Also, the speed of your CD-Rom drive, if you are playing the videos off the CD.

[laxman]

You mentioned VLC, thats what I use because its small and you can get it to stay on top and you can scrub perfeclty. If the file is jumpy in VLC then I don't think its a problem with the file. I've played files up to 1.6 gb total and about 1 mb/sec in VLC and its never had a problem. My computer isn't anything special either. Try updating your video card drivers, and get the latest version of VLC. You can also get the 'quicktime alternative' player and play the files in Windows Media Player Classic.

[gridlocke13]

I agree with "DeepPurple", scrubbing through the quicktime DT videos take a long time to seek. Be it on CD or on the HDD. After purchasing the DT vehicle training kit , seeking it via the CDROM\DVDROM was next to frustrating - especially when I wanted to quickly review what the person was saying about a certain item in Maya. Frustrated, I even copied it to my HDD, but still same problem. I lost more time, seeking (and having quicktime crash on me (if I seeked back and forth too fast)) than actually doing the tutorial.

I should be able to seek from any point of the video I want. Not starting from the beginning again. I've watched Gnomon Workshop tutorial DVDs (some of them are quiet large files), CG ToolKit DVDs, and their quicktime compression\seeking is flawless. Their DVDs work smoothly on my friend's Pentium III 533MHZ, 512MB ram, 128 Radeon 9600XT video card - just fine.

The seeking problem on the DT tutorials have to do with the compression codecs involved when compressing the tutorial footage from the master copy.

I'm running an AMD Dual Core 64bit 4400+, 256MB BFG 7800GTX, with 2.0GB RAM under Windows XP Professional with the latest Quicktime and all drivers and BIOS up to date.

[papa]

You are right it has to do with our compression. When we first launch the site and our product line we had slower computers to deliver the files to and now the systems are much faster. As a result if you watch any of our latest web videos or training kits that have come out in the past 8 months they scrub really fast. There of course will always be a few second delay since video compression that is lossless relies on the previous frames pixel data and that is what gets you a smaller file.

We have looked at allowing lots of scrubbing but then you would have to go with either a smaller image, less data on the disc (many people will split the training into smaller kits and have you purchase each one) and poor quality. You might check out a video like:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/video.php?v=862&f=q
and let me know your results on your system.

The file is streamed so you will have a short pause while it looks for an alpha frame to redraw the screen.

Papa

[gridlocke13]

Hi Papa,

The online streaming is perfect. It was just the ones that were purchased via CDROM which had seeking problems.
However, your explanation is understandable - compressing on older systems does lead to stepping back from heavy compression on the master copy.

Excellent work on the tutorials nonetheless.
You have my full support.