A/V Sync

seekermeister · 18 Jun 2012

I understand that the audio and video can sometimes be encoded out of sync, but what confuses me is that I have some films which were encoded properly and have played perfectly and in sync. However, which I replayed them much later, that they have developed a pronounced problem with being out of sync.

Hard drive corruption does not seem to be the problem, because if a file were corrupted, it would cause the file not to play at all, not just out of sync...right?

The hardware is the same as when they were encoded, so that shouldn't be a problem. I don't think that any of the main drivers have changed.

The only thing that I can think of that has changed is VLC Player version, but it works as always with most of my videos. I can swear that all of the problem files were the same, but the 3 that came to mind were all .mkv, which were all encoded with the same software (DVDFab), but as I said, that worked fine when I first encoded them.

I know that I can re-encode them but I would like to understand how to prevent this kind of problem in the future...any ideas?

Roderunner · 18 Jun 2012

Have you tried converting the .mkv files to another format. I recommend Free Video Converter| MP4 FLV 3GP AVI MKV DVD| FREE Download

seekermeister · 18 Jun 2012

No, because that doesn't solve the original sync issue that I'm asking about, and when I have converted format in the past, I always ended up with a larger file size, which is undesirable to me. I know that larger file sizes are supposed to go along with a higher quality video, but I have not seen an improvement in quality, only a bigger file, which is important when you maintain a very large archive on hard drives. Even when I selected to use the force sync option on one converter, it reduced the sync split, but didn't eliminate it.

As far as repair goes, I shall simply start from scratch with the problem files, unless I can find a simpler solution.

Roderunner · 18 Jun 2012

Sorry I could not help.

seekermeister · 18 Jun 2012

Never apologize for trying, that's a lot more than some do.

Dwarf · 25 Jun 2012

As your hardware is the same, and the files are OK (else they would give errors on access), we need to look at what has altered. You've said that the player version has changed. This may be where the problem lies. Sometimes, when this sort of program is updated one of the reasons is to improve performance and reduce CPU/GPU load when playing files using a specific codec (other codecs may or may not be affected). It is possible that this is what has happened to you.

I've found this, which might help: Video How to fix 'audio out of sync' in VLC Player

seekermeister · 25 Jun 2012

Thanks for the link, it will give me something to experiment with. Since the problem does not exist will all files of the same format, I did to doubt that the first method would work properly for me, but the second one might (on the fly). I'm still wondering about the root cause of this, because if it were VLC, it would seem that there would be a consistency in this that I have not experienced.

Dwarf · 26 Jun 2012

Has the above suggestion helped? You mentioned that only some files in that format were affected, could this be due to the codec variant being employed?

seekermeister · 26 Jun 2012

Unfortunately not, because the Ctrl K and L hotkeys are not working as they should. When I first tried the Ctrl K keys, it started to work, but was in the wrong direction, so I tried Ctrl L, and all that it would do was to open the playlist. Strangely, when I later went back to the Ctrl K, it wouldn't do anything at all.

The only codec variation would be that of VLC's, because if I understand correctly, it uses it own codec, which may have been changed when I upgraded.

EDIT: I'm beginning to think that the only solution is to re-encode those files. With as many as I have, I may have been wrong thinking that they were previously okay. At least re-encoding would eliminate that possibility. The only problem with that, is that I have all of my DVDs boxed up in the closet, and I have yet to devise a method of locating any particular one. That means that I will probably have to go through all of them. I am going to have to do that anyway...eventually, so that I can finish properly cataloging them, but have been putting it off.

Zepher · 26 Jun 2012

Reencoding an out of sync video will end up out of sync afterwards.

Most likely it's a codec issue with the new codec causing sync issues with your older encodes.
I recently had an issue with some x264 files that would be in sync in VLC but not in Zoom Player.
Had to go with a different version of halli media splitter to solve my issue.