Video Playback Troubles

Hemtunes · 08-27-2018, 02:21 PM

Hi,
I've been having trouble getting smooth-playing video in the Video Window. Have spent significant time searching for answers and checking all my settings, versions, etc. The problem is that when I try to play a video through Reaper, (I'm doing the audio mix on a video project,) the video always catches, the audio is choppy, and playback slows down. These are videos which run smoothly on my system if played directly through VLC, QT, etc. but always get bogged down within Reaper. I've had this problem consistently with a number of videos.

Here is a comprehensive list of my system and the particulars:
MacBook Pro - June 2009 (older machine but works great in every other fashion)
Retrofitted Hybrid Drive - 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 750GB
8Gigs of RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 512MB
OSX 10.10.5
Reaper v5.941 64bit
VLC v3.0.3 (set as Video Decoder Priority)
Current Video that's giving me trouble: MPEG4 2880x1440 H264 3:40
Frame Rate of Video and Session are matched - 29.97

All works great until I open the Video Window. Even in a session with only a single track - the video track - as soon as I open the video window, I get this problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I'm about to dive into an important project. Thanks!

Best,
Hemtunes

airon · 08-27-2018, 02:34 PM

Try transcoding to half its resolution, using the ProRes Poroxy codec in a Quicktime container. I recommend quality level 12-15.

Tencoder is a good application for this. Keep the audio separate. You can glue a copy of the video item and then disregard the audio of the video, if it has any, in the source properties of the video item.

Hemtunes · 08-27-2018, 03:25 PM

Thx, airon. Tried this, sadly with the same result.

svijayrathinam · 08-31-2018, 03:36 PM

Go to the pre releases forum. And download one of the reaper pre releases which says "icc18". I have had a similar issue. I reported that and they fixed it in icc versions. But that's still not updated on regular releases.

Hemtunes · 09-05-2018, 08:57 AM

Thanks. Will give it a try.

Hemtunes · 09-05-2018, 02:00 PM

svijayrathinam - Thank you! That made a huge difference. I still have trouble when I have a high track and plugin count, but it works quite well as long as I mute whatever tracks I'm not working on.
You're a lifesaver!