VLC Video Repair: How to Fix VLC Choppy Playback

With an increasing number of us taking videos via our mobile phones and tablets, those videos' problems are also on the increase. Many suffer from playback issues such as choppiness and jerky play. Luckily, specialist programs such as Recoverit are here to help make your videos smooth.

What Makes VCL Choppy Video?

VLC Media Player is a free, portable audio and video player app that supports Windows versions 10/8/7/ and even XP, Mac in 32bit/64bit versions, Android, iOS, and other platforms. Its flexibility makes it the video playback App for many. If you are a user of the many Internet-based video sites, then you know how frustrating it can be when the streaming video doesn't play correctly and can appear to be 'VCL choppy.'

When a video is described as being "choppy," it can mean several different reasons, including a stuttering frame rate, out-of-sync audio, VCL jerky playback, or even inconsistent stream speed. An example of this is the often-seen YouTube black screen, where video refuses to play. When you see a black screen on YouTube, it's because the video failed to load for some reason and maybe related to any of the issues above.

Some of the most common representations of a choppy video are:

Of these, inadequate system resources – the actual running systems of the computer, tablet, or phone – are insufficiently large enough to deal with playing the video correctly. The next most seen reason is the use of an incorrect or inappropriate video player.

The VCL media player can also suffer from choppy video playback. While this can be a real problem for viewers, there are several ways to address all of these issues causing choppy playback at once and making your video viewing experience a lot smoother.

How to Fix Choppy VCL Videos

Luckily, fixing choppy videos isn't too hard to do if you follow a few simple steps. However, there is more than one way to do this, so let's look at VCL's choppy video's main ways.

1. Update Computer Settings

You can help prevent choppy videos by freeing up system resources, helping your PC run video in a more streamlined way. To do this, you need to:

a) Empty your Internet browser's cache and temporary files. Click the "Tools" menu and then select "Delete Browser History" in Internet Explorer (other browsers may be different). These files can bog down your computer, so delete them to help it run faster. Figure 1 shows this.

b) Open your computer's "Control Panel" and then click "Display." Select the "Settings" tab, click on "Advanced," and then click "Troubleshoot." Drag the hardware acceleration slider to the left. This will reduce strain on your processor.

c) Add virtual memory. If you are using Windows Vista or 7, you can add extra RAM to your computer by plugging a USB mass storage device into the computer and allowing the system to convert the unused space into RAM.

d) Defragment by clicking "Start" and then select "Programs." Click "System Tools" and then "Disk Defragmenter." Running this will eliminate the fragmenting of files, which could be affecting your processor.

These steps should free up sufficient system resources to allow a video to be played.

2. Use Wondershare Repairit

You can use special programs such as Wondershare Repairit to repair videos that have been damaged or have many of the symptoms of choppy playback. To do this:

a) Open Wondershare Repairit Video Repair. Then, click on the " Add" button or hit "Add video and start repairing," add the program's desired video.

b) With the video selected via its checkbox, click the Repair button to start the repairing process.

c) Wondershare Repairit will tell you when the repair process has been completed, and it is safe to proceed.

d) You can preview the repaired video before saving it.

e) It will highlight the sample video for serious corrupted videos.

f) Once viewed, you can go ahead with repairing the proper file.

g) The repair is now completed. You can choose the file location and save the repaired video.

Wondershare Repairit is an application specially designed to repair MP4, MOV, 3GP files, etc., and could help you repair damaged mp4 files in any common causes. These include format changes, file header corruption, improper system shutdown, file read and write errors, virus attacks, improper download, and compression issues.

3. Alter the VCL Caching Time

You may find that altering the amount of cache memory that the VCL player uses can help with the video's flow that you see. To do this, open the VCL player, go to the tools menu, and go to the 'preferences' sub-menu at the main menu's bottom.

Then, click "All" under the "Show Settings" option at the bottom of the window. Click "Input / Codecs" in the left sidebar.

If the file that is skipping is playing from a local hard drive, look for the "File Caching (ms)" option under "Advanced" on the right-hand side. The caching value here is set in milliseconds, so setting the value to 1000 will buffer for 1 second (the default is 300, or 0.3 seconds). The problem with setting this option too large is that if you want to skip to a new point in the file manually, there will be a larger lag while the content is buffered again.

If the file you are trying to play is located on a network share, you can change the caching value for Network Caching in milliseconds (ms). See figure 8.

In figure 8, the buffer time for file caching has been set to 300ms, and the network caching is set to 1 second, but you can set these to almost anything that you need to allow the system to keep up with the flow of the video. You could set them to as high as 5 or even 20 seconds if you thought this would prevent your video from being choppy.

4. Disable Hardware Decoding

Your computer's hardware coding systems can sometimes cause conflicts that can interfere with your video-streaming hardware and software. Software decoding means that the video is handled mostly by software programs, and the system reads the video information using the Central Processing Unit (CPU) only.

Alternatively, hardware decoding transfers the main part of the decoding job to the CPU to decode video faster when referring to high-resolution videos. However, this can be taxing on system resources since high definition video decoding is an extremely CPU-occupying task that a computer with a low-power CPU can't decode such videos smoothly.

To help smooth this, in your VCL player, go to the tools menu and select preferences. Then go to Input / Codec selection. The Codecs section locates Hardware-accelerated decoding and sets it to Disable. See figure 9.

Once you have clicked save, video playback by VCL should be a lot smoother, and there should be an absence of choppiness.

How to Treat Your VCL Videos

The VLC Media Player is undoubtedly one of the most popular free video players available today. Much of the appeal comes from the fact that it plays virtually any audio or video file that you run through it without dealing with codecs at all. Furthermore, it is cross-platform, Open Source, and ships with loads of other features that you can make use of to enhance your video playback.

If you are a VLC user who uses the player to play video or audio files without having looked at the preferences once, you may miss out on some great features that improve your multimedia experience significantly. There are loads of features that help general playback, including:

a) Open recent files quickly. The VLC player maintains a history of recently watched items which can be accessed under Media > Open Recent Media in the player interface. That's useful if you want to play a video or audio file again and are not sure where to access it on your device.

b) Create Video Screenshots. If you want to create a quick screenshot of a video, you can do so right from within VLC Media Player. To do so, right-click the video and select Video > Take Snapshot from the context menu. You can then see this as a thumbnail image or expand it out to full size.

c) Play RAR Files. VCL is flexible enough to do this on unprotected RAR files. Just load the first part - if there are several compressed files together in the RAR - into the player, and it will start to play the video or audio just fine.

d) Add Bookmarks to Video. You can bookmark video and audio positions in VLC. This can be useful if you want your favorite part of a song or scene of a video on the fast dial at all times. Just open the bookmarks menu using Ctrl-B while the video or audio is playing, and click on create to add a new bookmark that links to the current position. You can then find the segment again when you need to.

Say goodbye to choppy, jerky, and broken video files using some of the go-to procedures to fix choppy or jerky videos described in this article. It is little as frustrating as having a video file that will not play correctly, and these fixes work to prevent this.