Trouble with .webm files

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I hope this is in the right place.

.webm files are much smaller than .mp4 ones but I find them extremely frustrating. Mostly I save instructional videos and with mp4’s I can easily stop, start, and skip forward or back to an exact time. Webms limit me to skipping by 30 sec. increments instead of going where I want. Stopping and restarting are sometimes possible and sometimes I can’t restart without returning to the beginning. And there’s a significant delay between clicking a button and the action happening.

On top of all that, the volume on the webm videos is a lot lower than the comparable mp4.

I use Firefox and Windows 10 version 1909. I play videos with the VLC media player. Is it me, or are these frustrations inherent in the webm format?

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areader wrote:

I use Firefox and Windows 10 version 1909. I play videos with the VLC media player. Is it me, or are these frustrations inherent in the webm format?

Not inherent in the container format, I’m able to seek with fine granularity in a .webm file.

But… I only tested one file (VP9/Opus), and there are more encoding variations possible. Not sure if going for max compression in VP8 would limit seeking, for example.

It could also be that your hardware acceleration for the video has limitations. I remember that having been the case on older hardware with h264, too…

Also I’m on Linux (Xubuntu 18.04 with a bunch of outside repositories).

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I hate to say it, but everything after your first sentence pretty much went over my head. I’m mostly saving the instrucctional videos off YouTube, so I have no idea what compression is used. My computer is about 5 years old (bought used, so I don’t know its actual age) but I have no idea whether that affects anything.

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areader wrote:

I’m mostly saving the instrucctional videos off YouTube, so I have no idea what compression is used.

At least you can check the codec. VLC’s Tools menu should have a media info tool, for example (hotkey Ctrl-I for me).

areader wrote:

My computer is about 5 years old (bought used, so I don’t know its actual age) but I have no idea whether that affects anything.

Might, if it’s the hardware acceleration that’s limiting things. That’s more about the GPU and drivers than CPU. (Mine was also bought used a few years ago, seems to be a 2012 model, but has a Quadro GPU…)

You could try changing those settings in VLC and see if that changes anything. And if it does, even if you can’t get acceptable playback speeds without HW accel but do get seeking, well, then I might try a different graphics driver version…

Let’s see if I can attach screengrabs of the mediainfo and preferences dialogs… there?

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It turns out the files were not playing in VLC but in WMP. When I dragged a filed to the open VLC player, all was good–except for a significant lag between clicking the icon and the action actual happening.

 

Thanks for the help. I’m sorry for wasting everyone’s time.

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areader wrote:

I’m sorry for wasting everyone’s time.

It reminded me to check the default player for .webm files. I don’t consider that a waste of time.

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I prefer to use 64bit MPC-BE player pre-configured by shark007: https://shark007.net/files/MPC_BE_x64Edition.exe

Along with the Advanced codec pack: https://shark007.net/advanced.html

 

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