On 10/31/2022 2:44 PM, MeMyself wrote:
Win XP Pro laptop.
4K Videos to play on VLC not play.
Need to downconvert to lower resolution so will play.
Free converter with batch convert would be nice.
Suggestions please.
Thank you.
They claim here, that recent VLC works on Windows XP.
Seems hard to believe.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
VLC can play a video, but by using "Save As" you can
do a conversion as well. Of a sort.
*******
WinXP has DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration). This is a subsystem
that at the driver level, makes video playback GPU acceleration
available to applications.
The problem with this, is virtually all Windows applications,
if they know about this, they use DXVA2. DXVA2 is available
in Vista through Windows 11, but not Windows XP. DXVA software
might have been available for a year or two.
I could take a newer OS and install it on the same hardware,
and play video with low overhead, where using the same
application software on Windows XP was slow as a slug. That's
because the CPU was forced to do all the playback work. The
video card could not help.
So if you were wondering "why does my OS suck", that's one of
the reasons right there.
*******
If you want to do conversions, you may notice that some programs
give credit to FFMPEG as being their conversion engine. An FFMPEG
package has three programs, and for Windows XP, any version
with a version number less than 4.x.x should work on Windows XP.
ffmpeg.exe # command line converter: MP4 to AVI container, for example
ffprobe.exe # just shows the movie type information
ffplay.exe # borderless video playback, as capable as VLC
https://www.videohelp.com/software/ffmpeg/old-versions
# Static means all the DLLs are inside the EXE, making moving the
# executable programs to the work directory easy.
ffmpeg-3.4.2-win32-static.zip 2018-02-25 43.6MB *
If you want help with a modern video, you could try running ffprobe
on it, and getting some info. It's better than nothing.
ffprobe somevideo.mp4
*******
To use this page, scroll down to see the descriptions.
https://www.videohelp.com/software/sections/all-in-one-video-converters
If we look at an entry in detail, you can see the maker
tries to piss off Windows XP users this way. You can see
they offer a 64-bit version, whereas the vast majority of
WinXP SP3 installs are 32-bit.
https://www.videohelp.com/software/HandBrake
Download HandBrake 1.5.1 Windows 64-bit 19MB Win64
If we go here instead... the i686 version would be a candidate
for a 32-bit Windows OS. The "funny numbers" indicate this
was a nightly build, versus an official build.
https://www.videohelp.com/software/HandBrake/old-versions
HandBrake-1.1.1-x86_64-Win_GUI.exe 2018-06-18 11.2MB *
HandBrake-1.1.0-x86_64-Win_GUI.exe 2018-04-08 11.2MB *
HandBrake-20170505-ec57a23_x86_64-Win_GUI.exe 2017-05-07 10MB *
HandBrake-20170505-ec57a23_i686-Win_GUI.exe 2017-05-07 9.7MB * <=== WinXP
HandBrake-1.0.7-x86_64-Win_GUI.exe 2017-04-10 10MB *
*******
Items like the Ice Cream Converter, that's based on FFMPEG,
with a wrapper done with QT5. This allows them to take
Linux source, and make Windows executables with it. They
do still have some work to do, to make the window for
operating the tool (do a layout and so on). When you use QT5
as a wrapper, the executable download can be a bit on the
large side. The IceCream folks are in Cypress, in an office
building. Many of their offerings now are payware, but
made the same way with QT wrapper.
*******
I tried this one recently in Linux (2.8.1 or so), and was surprised to find it worked :-)
https://www.videohelp.com/software/AviDemux
At one time, all that handled was AVI containers. It did not handle
MPEG2 or MP4 or MKV containers or MOV (apple) containers.
But somebody started adding back stuff you might find in FFMPEG
to it. At first, the code was very rough, and I had to leave the
more modern versions alone, because of the "flaky".
But the last time I tried it, it actually worked. I was shocked.
The version available for Windows XP, might be something like this.
But then, that's going to be a few years old. That's also a bit
newer than the last FFMPEG for WinXP, so it might not work. It's
wrapped in QT5 and has a QT5 folder. There is FFMPEG and libAV
as libraries or engines, for video conversion. There is a smaller
version of FFMPEG, sometimes built for engine usage, instead of Swiss-Army-Knife version.
Download AviDemux 2.7.4 for Windows 32-bit 2019-Aug-15th
To do a conversion, you change the declaration of the audio and video
codecs away from "Copy", as the movie will likely need to be
re-encoded and changed to a different container.
*******
Now a question you'd have to ask, is "what do I convert it into?".
That's a good question. I presume MPEG2 movie playback is OK.
Your CPU core is going to be stressed doing this stuff all by
itself. Which is why DXVA2 or equivalent is so helpful, as it
uses the GPU for this stuff.
Even with a crusty GPU in the laptop, "full screen scaler" has
been available in hardware since the ATI 9800Pro came out
(an AGP card). When a video needs to be scaled down, I
would expect such an animal can do it for free essentially.
But your CPU would be smothered, trying to make the initial
4K pixmap, before the scaler fits it to the laptop screen
for free.
IDCT is one of the older accelerators for video playback, and some
software developers now are so snooty, they refuse to use that
in their software. This is yet another gut-punch for WinXP users
(if you can get their software to run at all). When the new CPUs
run at 5GHz, the thinking is, using IDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
in the GPU is too slow. Whereas people with old CPUs really could
use some help.
I don't have a "favorite" converter, which is why I didn't just
pick one for you. I use ffmpeg from the command line, because
I know it can do just about anything. But the command line
is also time consuming.
Using FFMPEG on this box, I can do movie conversions at 330 frames
per second. That's for Hollywood CODECs perhaps. But if I did a
Cinepak, that's one frame per second or so. Just to give some
idea what ranges of transcodes is possible (or, impractical).
To finish my little Cinepak adventure, I cut the movie into
12 pieces, and did one piece on each CPU core. And that
make the project finish in a day or so. The splicing of Cinepak
back together, did not require a re-encode. FFMPEG joined the
video segments, at 200MB/sec :-) It was showing off.
If you had a newer desktop box, you might consider converting
your library on that box, rather than doing the conversion
under Windows XP. I'm sure you'll get something to work,
but it's going to take a while as you sort through the
converters.
*******
For amusement, some commands.
cd /d C:\FFMPEG\bin # I keep FFMPEG at the top of C:
# This tests how fast my GTX 1050 or 1080 video card is. Intel QuickSync
# can be fast like this too. This is a playback benchmark, where the
# video does not appear on the screen. It's just to test the hardware decoder.
ffmpeg -hwaccel nvdec -i Y:\FFMPEG\bin\VTS_02.mp4 -f null - -benchmark # Win7, 1110 FPS
# This is fully accelerated, single pass, transcoding. All on GPU.
# The NVENC is a sneak, and does the wrong thing, and regularly
# needs to be beaten with a stick. There's a good chance this command
# needs yet more parameters, to make it work right.
ffmpeg -hwaccel nvdec -i "fedora.mkv" -y -acodec aac -vcodec h264_nvenc -crf 23 "output2.mp4"
16.3x speedup, 488FPS
That's why, if I was converting a library, I really want
the video card to be my friend. Even if it's only to get
NVDEC helping with decode of the video, before transcode.
Handbrake has on occasion had GPU acceleration, but the last
time I tried to use it, the selector was gone for it. Which of
course, does not matter if your machine doesn't have working
hardware acceleration anyway.
Paul
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