OK, I finally got these very-low-frame-rate videos to play properly with the latest VLC player. Many of the videos that you can download from the UCSB KITP site are encoded at .1 fps (yes, that's 1/10 of a frame per second, or a new frame every 10 secs.). The VLC player _can_ handle these videos, but you have to change the "File caching" parameter to 30000 ms or more -- I set mine to 60000 ms = 60 _seconds_ of file caching. (This parameter doesn't want to go above 60 seconds.) Note that this setting doesn't harm latency, but might require enormous amounts of memory for "standard" frame rate video at 30fps or 60fps. BTW, I did some tests at a number of different frame rates & file caching parameter settings, and determined that if F=# frames per second, and C=file caching parameter in seconds, then F*C >= 3 seconds seems to work. In this case, F=0.1 and C=30 means that 0.1*30=3.0 >= 3, and it works. (IMHO this is a bug in VLC; the amount of file caching shouldn't be specified in terms of seconds, but in terms of the number of cached frames.) At 06:44 PM 1/13/2013, Robert Munafo wrote:

On 1/13/13, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

I'm running VLC 2.0.5 on both XP and Windows 7. Neither one shows the video; the audio plays fine.

Wow, that's a much bigger version number. (-:

...

I did a Google search, and VLC's problem with low frame rate video (< 3fps) appears to be well known.

Do you know any magic preferences settings for VLC to make .1fps video's work?

At http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=103264 a user suggests: "Tools => Preferences => Input & Codecs => Default caching policy => Higher latency => Save => Quit" (and then I guess, restart VLC and try playing the video)

Since it involves cacheing, I'll point out that I've done this in my VLC which might be why mine works. I use the detailed settings: Prefences => All (little button in lower-left corner) => Input/Codecs => Access Modules => File => Cacheing value and Extra network cacheing value both set to 1000 ms.

Also, why not try a VLC version closer to my version 1.1.10.1?

http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/1.1.10/win32/

It's only about 1.5 years old, and the great thing about Windows is that, (unlike Apple), Microsoft actually gives a $#&* about backwards compatibility, so you'll probably be able to run it for years to come.

I recommend you keep multiple old versions of VLC around, because "newer" seldom means "better".

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