Best Video Playback Software

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Rachelle Shriver

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Aug 3, 2024, 6:00:23 PM8/3/24

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The Filmfare Best Male Playback Singer Award is given by Indian film magazine Filmfare as a part of its annual Filmfare Awards for Hindi films, to recognise a male playback singer who has delivered an outstanding performance in a film song.

Although the Filmfare Awards started in 1954, awards for the best playback singer category started in 1959. From inception of the category through 1967, both the female and male singers used to compete for a single award, after which separate categories were created for female and male singers respectively.

I've done a few shows on Watchout and recently started conversation with a client to start on another show. By default I've always told the client that content needs to be ProRes 422. Recently I was thinking is that really still the best format for Watchout?

Does anyone find they have a go-to format/codec for playback of simple 1080p video clips? This would be running on standard 1080p outputs from intel based PCs running Win10 pro, NVIDIA Quadro M4000 GPUs and all Watchout optimisations performed.

Through a lot of testing, and I'm still not done yet, I've found that the video codec to use is HAP across the board. Depending on your hardware you can get up to 16 4K 60 videos playing where as the other formats are all 10 and below. Prores is actually playing better these days as Dataton has been writing and in control of the decoder instead of purchasing it from a 3rd party vendor (most of the other codec are handled this way).

I would second the preference for HAP. It is very high quality and playback is much better than any other format I have tried. I will sometimes use ProRes, but that is generally in a "get it on the screen" mode when that is the format delivered. If you can do a minimal amount of planning, there are plug ins for Adobe to allow rendering directly to HAP. Once I started using HAP, I've never looked back.

Thanks all. I have experience with HAP and D3 and have consistently been impressed by it. I always find it a bit of a pain transcoding things to HAP on a mac from Final Cut/compressor. But if it's the clear winner than I should really start getting used to it!

A very qualified yes. The mp4 codec has many option settings and those parameters can significantly affect stability. For example, an mp4 with bi-directional frames will probably play ok once in a quick test, but run that same file over and over again over the course of a day and it will often take the server down.

I normally use QuickTime with Animation codec for the things that need an alpha channel. And H264 for the rest. But my PC has 32 GB of RAM and a 6 core Xeon E5 CPU Windows running in 64 bit mode and a dedicated SSD for Caspars template and media folders. AFAIK DNxHD does not work very good. But I can also play ProRes quite nice.

I tried on both the i5 and the i9 hardware and the results were not what I expected.
Actually H.264 video performed better and consumed less CPU than other formats, even in a 6 Fill channel + 1 Fill/Key channel (+1 iVGA channel for preview) configuration it was better suited for video loop playback (LED or LCD displays).
I stuck with H.264 at high bitrates and low keyframe interval.

No CasparCG Reason for that. The machine came like that and I also use it with other boot images for different stuff. And none the less, more is better. @didikunz have you ever had a template or reason that used a bigger amount of RAM ?

I do a lot of development (Flash templates and custom clients) on that machine and I nearly always have at least a Flash/Animate, a Photoshop and a Visual Studio open at the same time, beside Caspar. When I then also open After Effects it starts to become slow. So that is why I think the more RAM you have, the better. And also the more CPU cores the better. As Caspar uses FFMPEG for video playback the CPU has all the work of decoding the video clips.

Is there a "recommended best Emby server settings"? Best recording format to reduce transcoding? During Recorded TV playback we are experiencing the voices being over 5 seconds behind the video (it starts out fine but worsen as you go) as well as issues where there are massive delays when trying to FF a TV show, especially if the show is still recording. I've included a couple screenshots of the settings as well as the PC Hardware specs. The Emby server (PC) hardware is getting old so maybe an upgrade is needed on top of setting changes? Are there recommended hardware specs?

Yes, the C drive is an SSD. I am using an AMD A8-7600 Radeon R7 processor which uses the Radeon R7 graphics processor. This processor is about 6 years old so the system "could" use an update but I'd hate to spend money on that if it isn't the issue.

Guess I misspoke, I upgraded from WMC when I updated from Win7 to Win10. This was for the Emby Server. It is running v. 4.5.4.0. , Theater 3.0, Firestick 1.8.54a and Emby Mac 1.9.9. Most of the playback issues are related to Firestick.

For 1080p Content - H264 High @ 10Mbit, with AAC Stereo in an MP4 or MKV container with no embedded subtitles is probably about as 'compatible' as you can get. Subtitles should be external .srt files.

Using the emby 'Convert' function will allow you to do this - and from then onwards, it should never transcode again ... (assuming you have 10Mbit/sec bandwidth - which in todays networks/broadband, should not be that much of an ask).

One thing I would try on the Fire app is turn OFF the option to direct play .TS files and see if it works better for you. Other than that, I don't believe there are any settings relevant to that particular situation.

ah right - yes sorry - this doesn't directly apply here but you should still 'try' and match the native broadcast codec to the playback device. So if it's MPEG2 or h264, then you 'should' be able to Direct Stream or even Direct Play - BUT different channels do all sorts of weird configs - interlaced, weird Audio codecs etc - so getting a match for everything is near impossible.

So, still experiencing audio delays, even with mkv movies, and playback delays, etc. Would like to reset all settings to default (including the FireStick) to clear out all the various troubleshooting changes that have been made. Anyone know if there is an easy way to do this or what each is if I do it manually?

Ok, I just sent logs via Fire Stick. We were watching the series premier of Kenan at 10:55 PM EST and I (Chris) was logged in. The audio kept getting more delayed from the video and then the screen went blank. I've cleared the catch and cleared the data on the stick but still it won't resume Kenan or other shows now. I did log in via my Mac and it played fine so this is definitely related to the Fire Stick. I did a bandwidth test and it was getting 200 down and 10 up so that is working as good as it will get wirelessly. This is a newer 2020 Firestick version.

Yes, I do think you are correct. It is back up and running but the sound/video still become unsynced plus the fast forward is an issue, especially when you first start to watch a recording. I believe this is due to transcoding. I've noticed if we pause the playback for a few secs and then start to play again it seems to help the syncing to catch up. I've reduced the playback quality a little to see if this helps. It is strange since we have 200 Mbps when we run a speed test at the FireStick so I can't understand why we are having this delay unless the FireStick itself isn't fast enough to decode.

Sorry I didn't get back to you on this. This issue is definitely related to our FireStick TVs. Our PCs (Windows & Macs) don't seem to be having these issues. I have reset everything to default that I can think of and was still experiencing these issues so I tried the external players option. VLC didn't work very well so I moved on to MX Player and that has seemed to resolve the issues.

On a side note, I've noticed the background pics for recorded TV are out of date. For example, The Equalizer is showing the original series backgrounds. Should I open a separate topic on this?

What is the best audio playback api for C/C++ for Linux, preferably free/open source? I need it for embedded Linux, so I'm looking for something as lightweight as possible with not to many dependencies?

That depends on what you mean by "audio". If you just want to play back raw PCM sample data, look at using the ALSA API directly. If you want to decode and play back encoded sound, you need to look at libraries supporting the required format(s), of course.

PulseAudio has been adopted by the major distributions and it looks like it is the upcoming Linux Audio standard as it is more flexible than ALSA. Here's an article about why you should care about PulseAudio (and how to start doing it).

If you are doing embeded stuff, I would use ALSA directly (although it is quite complex). I definitely wouldn't use something like PulseAudio, because it is quite heavy and adds just another layer (a whole separate server). SDL might be okay, but it is mainly meant for games.

My goal is to add beat synced effects via scenes and to use the delay control mode to do some glitched up fills. Also, would like to set up a flexible resampling workflow with record triggers and/or pickup machines.

I would love to hear from experienced users on their own best practices for playback of long samples. The reward will be comprehensive resource for the Elektron user community. (I will author video and docs.)