[Mike S.]

I've noticed an issue with OmniWeb 4.5.

I've already sent it to the OmniGroup and they contacted me about it for more info a while back but I am wondering if I'm alone in this seeing as no updates appear to be coming out to address it.

Essentially, all video playback within OmniWeb stutters and towards the end of a clip (maybe 2-4 seconds) playback pauses until the last few frames.

In some cases, a loaded video that hasn't been played yet or is paused will appear to flicker or jump ever so slightly, it's almost as if it's drawing two instances on top of each other.

Neither a Camino nightly nor Safari exhibit this behavior and I've tried throwing away all of OmniWeb's preferences, including it's Application Support folder, to no avail.

The only thing I haven't tried doing is narrowing it down to a third party QT codec for possible interference but I'd assume that would affect all QT playback and not just OW.

Has anybody else noticed this behavior?

[cpac]

nope.

but if you have a specific page where this happens, I'd be happy to double check for you.

[King Bob On The Cob]

It's not Omni. It's quicktime. If you don't have the movie totally downloaded when you start playing and it finishes downloading, it will stutter. If your connection's fast enough, it will be about 2 seconds before your done playing. (OmniWeb actually will compromise for your connection if you don't force it to start and it will finish downloading about 3 seconds before your movie finishes playing)

EDIT: Oops didn't read your post thoroughly enough. But I'll leave this up just FYI.

[Mike S.]

Originally posted by cpac:
nope.

but if you have a specific page where this happens, I'd be happy to double check for you.

There are no specifics, it does it with any video.

Guess I'll have to sludge through the QT folder and do some troubleshooting.

I once sent a debug report to Omni years ago to track a memory leak, I ran some terminal command and then just surfed around with OmniWeb and sent the resulting data dump to them.

I don't remember what it was I did though or if it would help them now provided I don't track it to a codec.

[Mike S.]

I just tried to troubleshoot by removing various QT .component files (HD/Library/Quicktime) one by one, quitting and restarting OmniWeb as I went along.

The problem doesn't appear to have anything to do with the codecs but it does appear to have some relation to the Services menu.

This is the only way I was able to get smooth video that was reproducible.

1) Allow a video to load, the frame will appear to jitter (it is not playing at this point)

2) Click the Omniweb menu, go to Services sub-menu and allow it to open, move pointer left off of menu and click into the browser window. You may need to allow the Services sub-menu to stay open for a second or two before clicking out.

3) The jittering stops and the movie plays smoothly.

It does not appear to work with any other menu/sub-menu except for Services

There are caveats:

It will not work if that is not the first thing you do prior to playing the movie. In other words, if you hit play first and then try the above steps it won't "fix the problem".

If you load another video file directly (in other words, input a direct URL or use a direct URL from history) the fix won't work on the second. However, if you access an intermediary page before loading another video the steps will allow it to play smoothly.

Example: Load page containing links to a video, click video one, apply work around, video will play. If you attempt to directly access a second video, say by changing the number in the URL [video1.mpg to video2.mpg] the trick will not work on the second but if you return to the link page and click the link to the second video the work around will function.

I know some Omni devs read these forums so I don't know if I should send this as an official bug report or not.

It sounds totally nuts but the above fix does work as described. The problem wasn't in all versions of 4.5, I believe it started with RC 2 and continued in RC 3 and Release.

[Mike S.]

I sent an official report into Omnigroup about it.

I just discovered that the Services menu had nothing to do with it, the problem appears to be with window levels and the video playback can be made smooth by hovering over the window control widgets (traffic lights) or holding down the volume control slider on the QT plug-in.

Changing the video window's level in any way will result in jerky playback until it's widgets are hovered over once more.

Only MPEG encoded video appears to be effected by this, not all video as I previously thought.