5D MkII Video playback with VLC
The Canon EOS 5D MkII can shoot video in either 640×480 (VGA) or 1920×1080 (1080P, Full HD) resolution, both encoded with H.264 video compression. Playing video files in the former is easy, but the sheer amount of data that needs to be processed with 1920×1080 resolution can tax even quite modern computers.
VLC has been my video player of choice for many years as it is free, open-source, and will play virtually everything you can throw at it – but disappointingly I couldn’t get it to play 5D MkII videos without major stuttering or no playback at all.
Thanks to this post on the Photography Within blog, I’ve now found a trick that enables VLC to play these files very smoothly – you just have to change one setting:
Go to Tools > Preferences
In the lower left of the box click the checkbox “Show settings – All”
Then go to Input & Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg and look for the option called “Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding”
Change it from “none” to “all”
Restart VLC
I’ve tried it on Windows and all the 5DmkII videos that were problematic before now play perfectly. It also works on Mac, though you may not need to do it on that platform.
Bear in mind this method DOES reduce the playback quality (by not doing any de-blocking noise reduction), so if you aren’t having problems with playback then don’t do it, but if you are then it’s pretty useful.
