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VLC (and general video playback) Problems Explained

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DVDR_Dog

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I was PM'ed a question and will post it here for all to see.
The question:
i've used vlc for several years now and find problems after watchng a lot of tv episodes mostly mkv--things like audio out of sync-subtitles way out of sync and i then reboot sometimes several times to get straightened out that seems to work for me--im still using laptop with win 7 ult--which slows down after looking at facebook--reboot solves that also

My reply:

That happens when your system gets overloaded decoding video. In Windows (vfw, video for windows) video decoding is giving top priority. What this means is audio decoding is secondary to video processing. Windows will cache the audio if it has become busy with video work, only when it has video in real-time will it work on the audio. What that means is you either experience audio lag or even worse, a crash as the buffer space expands and over rights Windows essential working memory RAM.
You can download and use a program like Video Inspector and it will check and determine if you have the correct codec installed rather than relying on the splitter in VLC, specific codecs are more efficient. VLC's strength is you don't have to chasing around for various codecs but sometimes at a price.
 
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