Choppy video

[HMishkoff]

Is anyone else experiencing choppiness when watching Arlo videos on the Arlo website? I know it's not a problem with my cameras, because when I download videos and watch them via a different video player, the videos are perfectly smooth. But the video player on the Arlo website sucks. It was fine until maybe a week ago, but they seemed to have lowered the sample rate so much that the videos are barely viewable online. I was wondering if anyone else is experiencing this problem and if there might be some kind of configuration option that might resolve the problem for me. Thanks!

[StephenB]

>>> I know it's not a problem with my cameras, because when I download videos and watch them via a different video player, the videos are perfectly smooth. But the video player on the Arlo website sucks. It was fine until maybe a week ago, but they seemed to have lowered the sample rate so much that the videos are barely viewable online. >>> This is quite confusing - The video playing in the browser is identical to the one you are downloading. And the player is built into the browser (with decoding being done by the PC hardware). You should be able to play the downloaded video in the browser - have you tried that?

[HMishkoff]

Back when I used to develop websites (a long time ago), I could embed video players in a web page if I wanted to show a video. I assume that's still possible. And I know that it's also possible to embed videos from other platforms, in which case you're using that platform's video player. And I think that HTML5 has its own integrated video player. I have no idea how Arlo plays videos on their web pages. All I know is Arlo's videos have always played smoothly on their site, now they don't anymore.

When I download one of the videos, I can play them locally (and smoothly) in maybe half a dozen different video players. However, I can't get the downloaded video file to play directly in my browser.

You say that decoding is done by the PC hardware. Are you sure it's that simple and that there's no a video player involved in the process somewhere?

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

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@HMishkoff wrote:

You say that decoding is done by the PC hardware. Are you sure it's that simple and that there's no a video player involved in the process somewhere?

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Arlo uses HEVC compression in their 2K and 4K video recordings. 

• That requires hardware acceleration to be enabled in Chrome (and a PC that has hardware acceleration for HEVC)  
• Edge might not need hardware acceleration - a while back it didn't, but then a Microsoft update changed that.  I'm not sure if that was a bug or not).  Either way, Edge needs the Microsoft Windows extension for HEVC.  
• Firefox doesn't support the codec at all.

I haven't studied the my.arlo.com html in any detail.  But if you drag the mp4 into Chrome, it will play using only facilities built into the browser.  If that is also choppy, it rules out my.arlo.com and the Arlo Cloud infrastructure.

[HMishkoff]

I've bee running it in Edge. I downloaded the HEVC extension (had to shell out $1!), didn't help, still choppy.

As you say, it doesn't run in Firefox at all.

But I discovered that it works perfectly in Chrome. Thanks for the suggestion, I might not have thought of that simple fix on my own.