I’m having massive problems with ELAN respectively playing the videos. The picture almost always desynchronises, falters and/or freezes completely (the audio is always fine). This happens when I want to make an annotation, when a press pause/play or forward/backward (or literally any other button). Sometimes even the whole programm crashes.
I’ve tried it on Windows (Windows 10 Enterprise) and Mac (macOS Big Sur Version 11.6 and also earlier versions of Catalina for example) as well as with different versions of ELAN itself (5.9, 6.0, 6.1 an 6.2). I can’t seem to find out what the problem might be. On some days (whyever) it suddenly DOES work and on others it just wouldn’t (which is the case most of the time).
The videos I try to code are between 70 MB and 5 GB (most of them around 1 GB).
I’d appreciate some help here, I’m beginning to despair since it costs me a lot more time to code the videos than it should.
If you need any additional information, just let me know, I’ll be pleased to send it to you.
Hi Olivia,
It is difficult to say what could be the problem, especially since it sometimes does work as it should. You already ruled out that the problem is machine dependent. What remains is the video file format and encoding (although if that would be the problem one would expect it would never work correctly).
As additional information you could maybe mention the file type of the videos and as much as you know about their encoding?
You could also check if you encounter the same problems with e.g. this example set. The file size is still a bit smaller than the smallest size you mention, but if this file works correctly it is still an indication of where to look at.
Hi Han,
Thank you for helping me with my problem.
The file type of my videos is MP4, the encoding h.264.
I tried ELAN with the example set you sent me and everything worked perfectly and as it should.
When looking for the information of the file type and encoding, I’ve noticed, that the file names are like this “text.MTS.mp4”. I just wondered whether the “.MTS” may be the problem? Or maybe the names of the folders (one with spaces between the words) in the path is a problem…
The “.MTS” might indeed be an indication of the problem. I’m not an expert in the media encoding field, but it looks like this could be an unusual combination of a transport stream, container and compression standard.
Maybe you could try to convert one of your files with Handbrake or ffmpeg according to suggestions in this media encoding guide?
I converted one (rather large) video with ffmpeg according to the guide you sent me and the new file works perfectly now! This seems to have made the trick!
Thank you so much for your help I appreciate it a lot!
