[RNLD] Problems with playback of Q4 video fles

[Stephen Morey]

Dear RNLD members,

For those of you considering getting the Q4, I have discovered the following about it.

I have been able to play the video files in real time, with both video and sound synchronically, by two methods:

1) The original .mov file can be played using a player called NewPlayer
2) I re-code the .mov file to .mp4 (using Xmedia Recode in my case) and play the .mp4 which then plays correctly in both KM Player and VLC Media Player.

When recoding to .mp4, the new .mp4 files is around 1/10 the size. XMedia recode offers several different Video Codecs audio codecs and it also offers Audio/Video Synchronisation

Can anyone advise which are best video codecs out of the following"
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 AVC/ H.264
Motion JPEG
XviD

And the best audio codecs?
AAC
AC3
MP2
MP3
Vorbis


Stephen Morey
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Centre for Research on Language Diversity
La Trobe University
Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=SMorey

________________________________________
From: Hiram Ring [hiram1 at e.ntu.edu.sg]
Sent: 13 May 2014 00:23
To: r-n-l-d at lists.unimelb.edu.au
Subject: Re: [RNLD] Problems with playback of video files

Stephen,

  I did some searching and found a website which has a few interesting comments on the Q4 (see below). In light of them and your own, you might try accessing the storage card/device through windows explorer (assuming you're on a PC) and copying the MOV files from the camera directly to your hard drive and backing them up. Then use another piece of software (MPEG Streamclip, for example) to re-code the files from MOV to an MP4 container/extension for editing and playback. Hopefully that will work better - try it with a short clip first, and if it doesn't work, experiment with a different format/extension.Hopefully the new files will be easier to play back and work with on your computer. Let me know if that helps.

Best,
Hiram

> http://kmgoto.jp/public/Q4video.html <
1. Initial Status (Windows 7)
        • ZOOM HandyShare does NOT work with Q4 video. The video freezes. It messes up video/audio synchronization if trimmed. (It still can be used for WAV audio only files.)
        • QuickTime can play this video/audio format but video freezes or plays slow.
        • Windows Media Player -- good video but no audio. It can play PCM 24bit audio in nature but only play 24bit wav file of specific header information. (It worked fine for PCM 24bit after K-lite codec pack was installed.)

_______________
Hiram Ring
PhD Student, Grammatical Description and Documentation
Nanyang Technological University
http://linguistics.hss.ntu.edu.sg

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On May 12, 2014, at 11:45 AM, Stephen Morey wrote:

> Dear RNLD list,
>
> Last week I purchased a Zoom Q4 camcorder so that members of the community could use it in the field.
>
> The recorder creates .mov files.
>
> When playing back the test recordings, the video and audio do not play back in synchrony on either of KM Player or VLC media player. On KM player, the video plays back at about half the speed of the sound, on VLC the video didn't play at all, just a fixed frame and when I tried with Quick Time Player the whole computer froze for 10 minutes.
>
> So what is the best solution for being able to replay recordings properly?
>
> Stephen
>
> Stephen Morey
> Australian Research Council Future Fellow
> Centre for Research on Language Diversity
> La Trobe University
> Website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/about/staff/profile?uname=SMorey
>
>