Arch Linux

kansas city shuffle

Member

Registered: 2015-07-20

Posts: 47

[SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

I've installed VLC 2.2.1-1 (without any codec packs) and it plays just about all video formats flawlessly except .mkv files which will occasionally get choppy/pixelated with a grey screen.

Is there a codec pack that I am missing to resolve this?

Last edited by kansas city shuffle (2015-08-23 03:13:50)

ugjka

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From: Latvia

Registered: 2014-04-01

Posts: 1,812

Website

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Vlc is self contained and doesn't need any codec packs.
What cpu do you have?

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kansas city shuffle

Member

Registered: 2015-07-20

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Vlc is self contained and doesn't need any codec packs.
What cpu do you have?

I am running my Arch Linux from a virtual machine (VirtualBox).

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00 GHz 2.00 Ghz
16GB of Ram
SSD

Rob_H

Member

Registered: 2012-06-19

Posts: 72

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Sounds like bad encoding. Does it happen with all MKV videos or just some? What codecs? I've had problems like this with videos encoded through OpenShot (or whatever it uses under the hood). Re-encoding through ffmpeg solved it for me.

sl1pkn07

Member

From: Spanishtán

Registered: 2010-03-30

Posts: 371

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

try other player

mpan

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Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,208

Website

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

@kansas city shuffle:
Artifacts such as this are usually caused by an error while decoding frames: either because a stream is damaged or the computer failed to decode the frame in time. The second cause comes most often from slow HDD or poor overall performance. While I have never experienced the issue myself, I had reports from friends with older PCs that they have problems using Matroskas because it puts high load on their computers. So using another container (without re-coding streams) may be an option.

If the issue happens only from time to time, maybe some other process is using HDD or CPU and taking precious time from VLC. In such case either stop the process, make it nicer (see ionice and nice/renice) or increase VLC's buffer size (Preferences → Input/Codecs: "File cachng" option).

You may also check if the issue occurs in mplayer.

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Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

I'm quite sure using VirtualBox is the problem. Because in VB there's no accelerated video presentation, which means lots of stress on the CPU. And it seems then there's not enough CPU power left for decoding intense files (I'm assuming those mkv files are very high resolution). So do a real install where you'll have accelerated video presentation and possibly even accelerated video decoding.

kansas city shuffle

Member

Registered: 2015-07-20

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Sounds like bad encoding. Does it happen with all MKV videos or just some? What codecs? I've had problems like this with videos encoded through OpenShot (or whatever it uses under the hood). Re-encoding through ffmpeg solved it for me.

Thus far it seems to be 2/2 with both .mkv movies having the same stuttering/grey screen at the same moments in the video.

I am not using any codecs just what was provided from the VLC install.

The video file in question is using:

X264 core video codec, JYK encoder, AVC video format and AC3 audio format

kansas city shuffle

Member

Registered: 2015-07-20

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Thanks for the insight and suggestions all.

Using MPV player and the playback is flawless, no grey screen or pixelation.

keevitaja

Member

Registered: 2015-08-22

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Hi. For me the solution in vlc `tools>preferences>all>input/codecs` and set file caching to 6000ms

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,797

Re: [SOLVED] VLC player gets choppy and a grey screen with .mkv files

Taking this opportunity to close this old thread.

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