The SmoothVideo Project is pretty awesome. My only gripe as a passionate user of Zoom Player is that the combination of LAV decoders and the ffdshow raw filter to inject SVP into the pipeline can be pretty unstable. Seeking around in playing media often leads to the media player crashing.
The culprit seems to be ffdshow. While the filter was an absolutely incredible and indispensable part of every afficionados’ filter graph a few years ago, the project is pretty much abandoned. So what are our options to mitigate the crashes without switching to mpv or another 64bit media player?
Turns out that CrendKing has built the awesome AviSynth Filter. After unpacking and installing the filters, we can alter Zoom Player’s Smart Play decoder settings:
Open Zoom Player’s Smart Play options and select a video decoder to test with. In this case, let’s alter the H264 configuration. Click “Configure”.
Select the LAV Video Decoder profile, click “Add Filter” and select the “AviSynth Filter” from the list. Make sure that LAV Video Decoder is the first filter and AviSynth the second.
Afterwards, click “Save active filter(s) as a New Profile”, give it nice name, increase the priority to top and select the profile to activate it. Close the dialogue with OK.
Apply the settings, restart Zoom Player and play a h.264 video file to test. You should see that SVP is active. Seeking in the video should no longer crash the entire player.
