7D Question

Regarding the HD content, The HD video runs really choppy on my PC on 1920 at 30fps and1270x720 at 60 fps, however its perfect when viewed on the camera.

When I upload the video to Facebook or Photobucket the video is smooth (FLV content)

Any advice on decreasing the choppiness of the video when viewing on the PC?

(PC is running Windows Vista on a Inspiron 1720 with 512 Meg Video Card and 4 Gigs of RAM. The HDD is 5200 RPM)

Thanks in Advance!

IMO, your HDD "Spindle Speed" is too slow...

You really want a 7200rpm drive for video (10K is even better...)

I think a 1 GB or higher video card would really help.

I agree, hard drive speed is kind of slow. I don't think a video card with more RAM would help in this situation.

I went through this a while back with video from a Canon HF100. First and foremost, you need a decent CPU and/or video card. I say "and/or" because if you have the right codec, it would utilize the video card in decoding the content. If you have a mediocre codec, most of the decoding will fall on the CPU. You didn't mention what CPU you have in your 1720, but since its most likely not a quad core, I'm going to say that its not enough (my C2D P9500 XPS 16 doesnt do it well enough either.. my AMD quad is OK). You can tell this is the case because when you're playing back HD video, watch your CPU utilization, it will probably spike to around 100% and stay there, your CPU fan will go crazy and you'll think your laptop is preparing for liftoff.

So the question kind of boils down to, which is the best codec. Unfortunately, I can't really tell you. When I was looking into it, CoreAVC came up a lot. They offer a free trial but it costs like $20 to register. CoreAVC, however, is optimized for use with nVidia graphics chips (at the time, not sure about now). So if your 1720 is using a decent nVidia GPU, then this may work for you. My Dell doesnt have an nVidia GPU, so it didnt do much for me.

I also read a lot about PowerDVD. The newer version (v8 or 9, around there) was able to playback HD video. I actually went this route at the time. My CPU utilization dropped by about 50-70% when watching the same HD videos. And as expected, playback was very smooth.

A couple other things, if you install ZoomBrowser and play the video through there, it should play OK. If it doesnt, then your CPU/GPU may be lacking. ZB works OK for me, still not as good as PowerDVD though.. meaning, its still a little choppy at times. And surprisingly, Windows 7 may solve your problems. Windows 7 finally came with the necessary codecs to playback HD video. When trying to play back HD content using Windows Media Player on Win 7, my CPU utilization stays around 40%, not too bad, and it's not choppy.

Edit: Actually, I'm not sure about ZoomBrowser playing back HD video. I forgot that my HF100 came with some video editing software called Pixela. When you install Pixela, it would install its own codec, which was half-way decent at decoding HD video. I'm not sure the 7D's software bundle comes with a HD codec or not. With my current setup, yes, ZB does playback video, but I'm not sure if its using some Canon supplied codec or if it's just using Windows 7's codec. Yeah, confusing.. thats why I stopped looking into it once I got it working.

I'm sure someone more knowledgeable will correct me, but this is what I found when I ran into issues about 6-7 months ago trying to play back HF100 footage. Today, Windows 7 and WMP work fine on the same computer.

I'm running at a higher monitor resolution and video from the 5DII runs perfctly fine. Don't know what your problem is. Slow video card or CPU. I doubt it is the hard drive.

Several Things that you need to factor into determining whether your computer is capable of playing full HD videos:

Computer Processor - How fast is it? What's the bus rate?
Video Card - What kind is it and how large is the memory - NVIDIA GeForce GT and the ATI Radeon HD series cards are typically the ones people go for.
Monitor resolution - can you monitor display 1920-by-1200 pixel-resolution?
Hard drive Space - How much available room do you have? 5200 rpm should still be good to display HD footage
Memory - How much memory do you have installed on your computer?
What video application are you using to view these HD videos with?

I think once you answer these questions, without a doubt, you'll figure out what the issue is.

ejicon wrote in post #9011020
Several Things that you need to factor into determining whether your computer is capable of playing full HD videos:

Computer Processor - How fast is it? What's the bus rate?
Video Card - What kind is it and how large is the memory - NVIDIA GeForce GT and the ATI Radeon HD series cards are typically the ones people go for.
Monitor resolution - can you monitor display 1920-by-1200 pixel-resolution?
Hard drive Space - How much available room do you have? 5200 rpm should still be good to display HD footage
Memory - How much memory do you have installed on your computer?
What video application are you using to view these HD videos with?

I think once you answer these questions, without a doubt, you'll figure out what the issue is.

# Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit)
# Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7500 (2.20GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB)
# 4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
# 120GB Total Space
# 8x DVD (+/-R double layer) drive
# 17.0" diagonal widescreen TrueLife TFT LCD display at 1920x1200 (WUXGA, Glossy)
#I think the video card is 256MBs but I am sure its an NVidia GeForce Go 8600M GT


I ran the video and the task manager at the same time. The core processor was running at 60%

At this point am I looking at a codec issue?

What player are you using?

I suspect it's a player/codec issue. The *.mov played like crap on my Win XP Pro. Super choppy. It would be fine after I converted it to MP4.

Now that I've installed Windows 7 Ult 64-bit (with the same exact hardware), the new Windows Media Player can play the movies just fine, although it's a bit grainy/noisy. And the video cleans up after converting it to MP4.

I suspect your problems right now is likely the media player, or the harddrive.

Waldemar Sikorski wrote in post #9011569
What player are you using?

Most recent version of Quicktime Pro and Windows Media Player Classic with latest K-Lite Mega Codecs..

Keep the suggestions coming!

Here's a linkto an earlier reply. Since you've ventured out into independent players why not try one more? Highly customizable. The skin in my screen shot is a custom one, not included. I use CoreAVC codec most of the time and alter renderers media file depending. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

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It doesn't matter what the rest of the hardware is if the HDD can't spit it out...

Ideally, 7200 is the spec for SD video so HD doesn't have a prayer at 5400rpm.

Avids run 10K discs for a reason.

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #9011936
It doesn't matter what the rest of the hardware is if the HDD can't spit it out...

Ideally, 7200 is the spec for SD video so HD doesn't have a prayer at 5400rpm.

Avids run 10K discs for a reason.

http://blogs.zdnet.com​/Ou/?p=322
Interestingly my laptop came with a Blu-Ray player and 5400rpm HDD.

Remember that we're dealing with sustained throughput not burst read/write times...