Choppy iTunes video

January 15, 2006 8:38 PM

Why would an iTunes-ordered TV show have choppy playback?

Posted for a friend:
My dad bought an episode of Desperate Housewives via iTunes. But, when he tries to watch it, it's really choppy, like it's actually a shitty streaming video... audio is fine, just video is chopping. So, he went and downloaded an episode of Monk and ended up with the same problem.

He can make a backup copy but can't burn it to a DVD. I farted around with it and Googled the shit out of the topic but couldn't find anything... It IS chopping.

We can't test it on a video iPod since none of us has one. Apple claims you can watch these not only on your iPod but also on an Apple or Windows system.

A friend suggested that it was the memory on his video card. But he's able to watch other vids he downloads via Bearshare or whatever just fine. Also, he does other streaming videos fine. He has a fast cable connection (4mps or whatever).

He did find an address for Apple (after many failed attempts to call them... busy busy busy signals) and they have sent him a few followup emails saying they're looking into it and should have an answer to him "within 72 hours" and this was from Friday...

What I personally know is that this is a moderately used Dell that had XP loaded fresh on it last year. I know that the iTunes TV show videos are of limited quality, so I can't see why they alone are causing problems -- unless there's a codec issue, but Quicktime usually isn't as susceptible to that.

posted by dhartung to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The codec used for video by Quicktime/iTunes is called H.264. There are intermittent reports of choppiness under Windows XP that I don't think were reproduced under OS X.
posted by Rothko at 8:55 PM on January 15, 2006

The only video clip I have is the "Lazy Sunday" short from SNL, and that has 29.97 fps, but it's VBR, so that shouldn't be a problem. It will look a bit pixelated at full screen or even double size since it's only meant 320 x 176 resolution.

Can you try opening it in Quicktime directly, then go to Movie Info, play the video and see what FPS rates you are getting?
posted by riffola at 8:55 PM on January 15, 2006

H.264 is supposedly pretty CPU-intensive... perhaps the machine isn't fast enough to decode the video? You say it had a fresh load of XP last year, implying that it's older than that.

How fast is the machine, and how much RAM does it have?
posted by Malor at 9:04 PM on January 15, 2006

How fast is the machine? I'm not on a PC, but on my 600Mhz iBook I've noticed that since Quicktime 7 came out a lot of the videos I try to watch I have trouble with — the audio will play fine, but the video only shows a frame or two every few seconds.

(somewhat related AskMeFi question from November: Ever since upgrading to QuickTime 7 and Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), I've noticed that apparently what I think is the H.264 and H.267 codecs play very choppily on my machine.
posted by blueberry at 9:09 PM on January 15, 2006

It's the processor or there's a low amount of available memory. My girlfriend's PC running Windows XP is older (1GHz). It runs iTunes and can handle most divx-encoded files but chokes on playing H.264 content -- including stuff from the iTunes Store that you mentioned. Her iPod plays it just fine.
posted by mikeh at 6:55 AM on January 16, 2006

This may not help dhartung's friend's dad specifically (I assume that iTMS-purchased video won't play outside of iTunes/Quicktime/ipodDRMland) but I found that VLC gave smooth playback of H.264-encoded files on an old PII-400 running XP when quicktime choked on them.
posted by drumcorpse at 10:23 AM on January 16, 2006