Video Problem-Picture delay

[angelosbg]

I have installed Linux Mint for the first time,so you can understand that I am a newbie.
I have a problem with every player I use.
When I watch an avi,an mpeg or whatever the picture has a small delay compared to sound.I have installed the ubuntu r4estricted extras and I didn;t find a solution.


What else can you suggest?

[D-cat]

Are you using a digital (DVI connection) monitor? This may be a delay built in on the monitor, of which the solution is to add an equal delay to all the sound output. I have no idea how to do that. Is this delay also present with other stuff, like mouse movements?

[angelosbg]

No,the delay is just on the video.I am sure that it doesn;'t have to do with the monitor.

[D-cat]

Okay, what player are you using? How much of a delay do you estimate the video has? and, Have you tried other video players? I'll start with that.

[angelosbg]

I have a problem with every player I use.

The delay is not even a second but you understand that it is important.The problem is on the frames

[D-cat]

Correct, but some programs call DirectFB a little differently (Totem and Kaffiene use Xine, Mplayer and VLC have their own call routines. I personally think MPlayer works best), and some might even be able to adjust the delay. We can also try fiddling with buffer sizes to help improve the throughput and reduce video delay. That's why I was asking what you used, some setting adjustment may be all that's needed.

Also, what speed is your processor? I've found with some older computers, there will be a delay in the video output that gets larger with resolution and framerate. This occurs both in Linux and Windows (I have a whole collection of videos I recoded to 352x240x15 because of that) on processors less than about 500MHz in my experience.

[angelosbg]

Yes,the problem happens with all the players at the same time.! month before,when I was using windows I didn't have that problem.I am sure it has to do with linux.

[D-cat]

Okay, well, now we'll see why Linux and Windows have a very big difference!

In MPlayer, the command line to adjust delay is -delay [seconds], so you can add -delay -0.5 to the command that executes MPlayer and see if it fixes your problem there. This is easier in some front ends that allow you to manually fix the command (like SMplayer). Supposedly, you can also use the numpad's "+" and "-" keys to adjust the delay by .1 second each... I don't know by which direction is which.

VLC has a desync compensation option under Audio settings.

For Xine based players, looking at the xine man page, there appears to be no way of invoking a delay prior to playback, but the keys m and n should adjust delay during playback ("n" delays audio).

[angelosbg]

Yes,but I think the problem is of different situation.I cannot all the time set delay to videos and things like that.
There seems to be a problem on playback,something is going wrong.The video may freeze for a while and the audio continue.When I look at the mouth of the actors is like someone else is talking.This is how the things go..

[D-cat]

Do you mean like the video plays fast, then pauses, then repeats? (Everything below is assuming that answer is yes) Those kind of issues are usually the result of a bad codec having encoded the video itself (conflict between frame rate and time marks). Seeing as you're complaining of issues from all different video formats, that would seem unlikely, so I am indeed baffled.

Videos which are encoded with variable bit-rate audio (VBR) have A/V sync issues all the time (sometimes to the tune of 10 seconds in the middle of the video), but they don't usually result in paused video.

There has to be a rendering or timing fault that's playing your frames overspeed, then when it hits a time mark, pauses and waits for the audio to catch up, then repeats the whole process. Honestly, I haven't seen that happen in about 10 years or so, and that was on a Win 95 machine, it was the result of the encoding being a different frame rate than the source video without frame conversion. That would not be your problem, I think yours is processing to the frame buffer after decoding (or it wouldn't affect multiple formats)... and I have no idea how to fix it.

Thought: What kind of video card do you have? I've observed 3D games using hardware accelleration doing that same thing on some ATI cards... there was no fix.