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Variable Speed Playback with MPG2

R

RHS

Flightless Bird
Hi,

I have code to control the playback speed of a video using the Windows Media
Player (Version 10) as an ActiveX control. The code works using WMV files,
although it does not work using MPG2 video.

How do I make it (Windows Media Player) allow variable playback speeds of
MPG2 videos? Is there a codec I can use that supports this?
 
N

Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]

Flightless Bird
On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:23:01 -0700, RHS
<RHS@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>I have code to control the playback speed of a video using the Windows Media
>Player (Version 10) as an ActiveX control. The code works using WMV files,
>although it does not work using MPG2 video.
>
>How do I make it (Windows Media Player) allow variable playback speeds of
>MPG2 videos? Is there a codec I can use that supports this?


Most ASF files contain video using the WMV codec in various forms. All
of those formats support indexed seek and variable speed play in WMP.

Most other formats don't support variable speed and may not even have
an index to allow WMP to effectively seek within the file.

MPEG2 is a bit of a special case being DVD video in most guises, and a
few tricks are used - in general proper seek support depends on the
installed decoder (proper in this sense includes both the ability to
accurately seek to non-keyframes and being able to playback and resume
without glitches)

You cannot rely *at all* on the end user having *any* MPEG2 decoder,
which are usually purchased (added cost) so I'd stick to more
recognised formats which are suitable for streaming - MPEG2 is not
easy to optimise for streaming delivery and usually results in very
high bitrates compared to WMV9 Advanced Profile, or H264 (MPEG4)
video.

Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2010
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs
 
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