Samsung HMX20 Interlacing & Playback

[Grumple]

Hi all,

I've had this camera for nearly a year now, and before the warrenty runs out I'd like to try and solve this issue (if it can be...).

All the video I shoot looks great on the camera's screen when played back. When I plug it directly into my tv it plays fine. But when I put the video onto my laptop everything goes wrong...

Firstly, I cannot find 1 media player that will play the files properly. I've tried PowerDVD, WMP, VLC, DiVX, Adobe Media Player + Quicktime - Some just crash without playing a second (WMP + PowerDVD), others just play the audio and stop attempting the video after a second and the one that gets closest (Adobe) struggles to play it smoothly and has 'waves' through it.

Is this camera just crap? Is this just how samsung make their HDV camera's?

It is hugely disappointing because I spent a long time finding the right camera and I'd not heard of anything like this at the time...

I've got it back from Samsung today after getting it looked at. The report says 'dismantled camera to replace sub PCB assembly' which means absolutelly nothing to me.

I've tested it, and nothing has changed.

I've read about 'de-interlacing' - So am I supposed to de-interlace my video's before attempting to edit them???

I gave up editing my video's after the first attempt because of this. But I now have nearly a years worth of video that could do with some...

All my videos are stripey and unwatchable as soon as I put them on my laptop - What am I supposed to do?


Any advice would be greatly apreciated.

Cheers

[senu]

I dont know your spec of PC but I assure you these 2 should play back the footage well off a PC
MPC HC
and
Splash
Both free and work well especially if you have Hardware Accelaration on the GPU and you can turn on deinterlacing in the configurations
Ive found that VLCs deinterlacing cannot be turned on permanently but it can for immediate playback
Dont deinterlace during editing, you can do that during the playback with the playback software

[Tinderbox (UK)]

TV`s automatic de-interlace when computer do not, that why video playback can look so bad.

I usually use the free VLC player to playback my HD videos as it has a de-interlace function, I use BOB.

A little more info below.

What is deinterlacing? The best method to deinterlace movies

[Grumple]

Hi,

Thanks for all the info.

Splash player cannot play anything at all - it just gives me the error 'DDraw - Failed to create overlay surface'

MPC HC just does nothing at all... You go to load a file and it opens it, says 'playing' but just sits there doing nothing with a grey screen...


Interesting to know TVs do their own deinterlacing etc... So it really only means that my laptop playback is rubbish...

Seems that nothing works to sort it atm though.

I've tried so many players now it seems rediculous that nothing can play these files properly when my tv can

[senu]

Originally Posted by Grumple

Hi,

Thanks for all the info.

Splash player cannot play anything at all - it just gives me the error 'DDraw - Failed to create overlay surface'

MPC HC just does nothing at all... You go to load a file and it opens it, says 'playing' but just sits there doing nothing with a grey screen...


Interesting to know TVs do their own deinterlacing etc... So it really only means that my laptop playback is rubbish...

Seems that nothing works to sort it atm though.

I've tried so many players now it seems rediculous that nothing can play these files properly when my tv can

I have several samples of the HMX20s AVCHD files which play on my systems on more than one PC, however my P4 struggles
If you have a small file you can send by email attachment I could try it
Send a PM ill send my email add

You dont say what the spec of your laptop is, and if its graphics card can do hardware acceleration
AVCHD playback generally does better with a c2d processor or better with more than 2Gb Ram and even better if the graphics card has hardware decoding
This is not at all specific to Samsung any AVCHD camcorder you buy will produce similar files.
I know of the Pure Video HD drivers of nvidia and ATI AVIVA, enab.le thier GPUs to pay AVCHD with ease
I understand some intel chip sets can too