Two questions about videos and VLC

[caliente]

First off, I love VLC, it's a great invention, it's about the only app I use to watch videos anymore and it plays everything. But there are times with certain videos that fast forwarding or skipping ahead is a little messed up. It still works, but the image starts off with no color and indistinct, sort of like gray shadows. The image develops slowly from a few points in the screen then gradually appears until all is normal. This only takes a few seconds but it's annoying when it happens. I like to fast forward through some movies and this really slows me down. I have always figured it was something about the way the video was converted before it was uploaded or something, so I imagine there is nothing I can do about it from my end. Am I right about that? The same videos do it all the time, it's not a matter of reloading them or anything like that. I think I've even tried redownloading them, and it didn't help. By the way, in case it matters I have an iMac.

Another VLC question...is there any way with VLC for Mac to open two screens at once? With Quicktime player and RealPlayer you can have multiple videos open at once, but with VLC I only know how to do one at a time. Is that all you are limited to?

Thanks guys. These questions have been weighing on my mind forever and it occurred to me somebody here would probably have the answer.

 

[gb2000ie]

It's my understanding that the funny artefacting your describe is the result of bad video encoding in the file, so there is nothing you can do about it. I'm open to correction on that though.

As for multiple windows, I don't think you can with the new VLC design.

 

[caliente]

Yeah that seems to be the case. If I delete a video then download the same one, it does it again. But if it's a different download (like a completely different source, different size, etc.) it can work.... I'm not sure if I said that right but hopefully you know what I'm talking about.

 

[stoobie]

Some videos are encoded with very few 'key' or full frames. The rest are the differences between the last frame and the next. If you move to a non-key frame, you only see the bits of video that have changed since the previous frame, hence the partial screens. The fewer key frames allows a video to be reduced in size but does hamper forwarding. A different version of the video might have more or less key frames so would not ff or rw in the same way.

Re multiple instances on the mac, I don't know if this helps:
https://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_play_multiple_instances_of_VLC/