audio issue with .mkv

Entree
Rep: 0

Joined: 18 Aug 2007
Posts: 1
OFFLINE

Hello everyone,

just hopefully wondering if someone might be able to shed some light on my little problem. When play a .mkv file thru most of it will play fine but i would say about 4-5 times maybee a little more I experiance a video lag and audio becomes miss matched. It looks like for a few seconds the video slows and then will play normal with delayed audio then almost fast forward the video to match with audio again. I have tried uninstall and reinstalling the vista codec pack. removed that and install combined community codec, and have also tried the lazy mans mkv codec pack and none of which helped. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Regular
Rep: 6

Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,285

There’s a zillion possible causes for audio synchronization problems, and they can be hard to pinpoint. The two that come to my mind are
1. You CPU is underpowered and is choking through one of the streams (audio and video), while the other is fine. One way to check is to right click on your taskbar anywhere (left of the system tray) and choose task manager and look under the performance tab. If CPU usage is at 100% during playback, then your CPU is choking. There’s not much that can be done besides getting newer hardware. You can attempt to close all background programs and tasks that may be running (for example in the system tray) so as to allocate as much CPU power to playback as possible. You can also try to get a version of the movie that uses a less CPU-intensive codec. (H.264/x264 are in a category of their own in terms of CPU usage (extremely processor-intensive); then there’s xvid/divx/windows media video 9; then there’s everything else... just an idea in terms of CPU usage hierarchies)
2. There’s also the possibility of a bad source. The person who encoded the file didn’t do a good encode. You can check that by playing another mkv file of similar length/codec and see if it also displays the same problems. If not, then it was the file, not your pc nor the player/decoders.

Of course there’s tons of other possibilities, but that’s the only two I can think of right now.