Fix for VLC Skipping and Lagging Playing High-Def Video Files
VLC is the king of all media… it plays almost anything on any platform, any time, any place. It’s great. Lately, however, I’ve been having issues with VLC skipping whenever I’m playing high-def media streaming over a network.
Fixing the Lagging and Skipping
If the file that is skipping is playing from a local hard drive, choose the “All” settings at the bottom of the dialog to show all of the options, then navigate to Input / Codecs -> Access modules -> File.
The caching value here is set in milliseconds, so setting the value to 1000 will buffer for 1 second (the default is 600, or 0.6 seconds). The problem with setting this option too large is that if you want to manually skip to a new point in the file, there will be a larger lag while the content is buffered again.
If the file you are trying to play is located on a network share, you can navigate to Input / Codecs -> Access modules -> SMB and change the caching value here.
For illustration, I’ve shown the value set to 1 second, but this setting can be used to buffer as much as you want… a cache of 20 seconds would probably eliminate the skipping even over wireless networks.
The next thing you can do is adjust an option that makes a huge difference when dealing with high-def media over a slow I/O connection… browse down to Input / Codecs -> Other codecs -> FFmpeg.
Change the “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding” option to All. This option makes playback smoother by slightly degrading the quality of the picture. You can try the other settings first, and only use this as a last resort.
The last setting, although arguably the most important one, is to test using a different video output module. Using the DirectX 3D video output should offload some of the processing onto the video card, but you can test OpenGL or GDI to see if it helps.
It should be noted that at least on my system, Direct3D is the default anyway.
Hopefully at least one of these tips will solve your buffering problems.
If you haven’t used VLC, you should head to their download page and check it out.
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Can you perhaps offer any sugesstions as far as caching if the file being streamed is an IPTV channel which I’m streaming from one machine over to another through WiFi?
Nice tips, although I like SMPlayer more (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/).
now i use media player classic with the k-lite codec pack
so much better than vlc and also plays .mkv’s in 720p and 1080p properly without lagging
I just went to do this and mine was defaulted to 300, not 600. It had to be the default because I’ve never changed it. Version 0.9.9 if it matters.
I’ve set it to 600 and we’ll see how that works
Media Player Classic (k-lite mega codec pack) certainly handles the Hi-Def videos in a much better way.
I’m not TOO sure but I think the most recent release (0.9.9) fixed that issue with the lagging because I haven’t experienced any ever since I updated. Again, I’m positive but I haven’t been noticing any drags and lags. But thanks for the tutorial!
thanks for your tutorial, I was wanting to use VLC for my HD vids instead of MPC.
thank you! you fixed my lag problem!
Hey, I did this, set me Cache to 100000, now when I skip ahead It stops playing the audio, if I then set it to the start of the file I get audio to play. Any idea about what I can do to fix this?
I had a problem with periodic skipping on my HDTV when running it as a second monitor. The problem seemed to be a refresh rate issue and enabling triple buffering and increasing the cache fixed the problem completely. Thanks
Still doesn’t work for me. It caches the amount requested at the start and then just stops playing part way into the video. Playing HD720p AVI over wireless network via windows network file sharing.
Most frustrating.