Some of all us people on a pc might have some problems with the raw video form the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. This i due to quicktime not really supporting hardware on PC’s.
However you can download a small free program called vlc that with a small settings change will playback the video just fine. In general this is a player i will HIGHLY recommend. It plays just about everything and you don’t need to install loads of codec packs and stuff like that. Go to this page for a free download: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Out of the box this might not play videos from the 5D Mark II perfectly but a simple change can fix this.
Go to Tool > Preferences in the box that opens make sure you turn on all in the show settings box to the lower left.
Then go to Input/ Codecs > Other Codecs > FFmpeg. Find the setting called Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding and set the option to all.
*** This trick should work just as well with video from the new Canon EOS 7D
VLC Settings
This should fix your problems and VLC should now playback the 5D Mark II video with no problems.
Tags: 5d, 5d mark II, 7d, canon, canon 7d, canon eos 5d, codec packs, download, eos, FFmpeg, h 264, loop filter, playing, playing 5d mark ii video, video, video playback, videolan, videos, vlc
23. januar 2009 08:59
Big thanks for the advice, now it works perfectly!
28. januar 2009 20:38
Hmmm… had my hope up but changing that doesn’t help for me. Still can’t get 5DmkII HD video to play back without lots of stuttering. This on Dell D830 2.2Ghz laptop with Nvidia NVS 135M graphics card. Any other ideas?
28. januar 2009 21:45
Sry I really don’t have any other ideas mayby the computer just is to slow. Footage like this
does take a bit of power to playback since it’s a lot of data.
29. januar 2009 01:09
Not sure why it didn’t work earlier… but now VLC is playing them 100% smoothly. Perhaps I needed to restart it or something. Thanks for the great tip!
29. januar 2009 08:37
A restart is often a good idea
Glad that you got it running 
20. februar 2009 04:12
Thank you so much for this, I thought I was having a card speed issue, even though I didn’t get the 4 buffer bars on my screen during video rec. after using vlc with the tweak you suggest my videos play and look great!! Stupid quicktime, i’ve never liked it anyway
20. februar 2009 18:02
Your welcome
Glad I could help
2. marts 2009 13:13
excellent – just what i needed to know – thank you.
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30. marts 2009 07:53
Play perfect now. But appear compression artefacts. Anyway – not bad.
24. april 2009 15:27
Not working with my MAC power PC with 10.4 It would open the screen but then I adjusted to codecs as requested and now the Mac hangs and I have to force quit. Help please.
24. april 2009 16:03
On a mac you should not have to deal with these problems they should play them native without any problems. Try just playing it back with quicktime.
4. maj 2009 17:18
mm. interesting
5. juli 2009 14:09
This is absolutely brilliant! Kind of strange that you need to set some obscure option to get smooth video playback in VLC (QT will *never* be installed on any of my PCs)…but now it looks good!
Thanks!!
9. juli 2009 21:51
totally works! thanks!
10. juli 2009 17:32
Makes you wonder why Canon didnt make the video format something that was compatible straight out of the box, or at least given us the choice of video format. Seems silly really to restrict us, but maybe its my lack of understanding.
21. juli 2009 22:12
Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!
20. oktober 2009 23:20
Works exactly as described by you (both the video and the audio) using recent eos 5d mark II HD recordings.
Thanks very much indeed.
4. november 2009 06:53
Worked perfectly on my previously stuttering 7D video shot in 25, 24, 60 1080 and 7620. Worked after a few minutes (no restart) on my dell laptop at work.
C2 duo 2.2G, 2GB RAM, Intel 965 GPU.
I tried current version of QuickTime 7.6.4 however this did not work.
Thanks!!
22. november 2009 15:34
worked OK for me
thanks for the tip
RB
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18. februar 2010 20:17
Many thanks for this advice !
Now playing my video on pc which I thought was not possible ! Works great.
18. februar 2010 21:47
Thanks. I was having a problem with jumpy jerky video playback from my Canon 7d using Quicktime on several different PCs I tried. When I heard about VLC mediat player and tried it I still had the problem – until I found your note about changing the loop filter playback for for H.264 decoding. Everything now looks as good as I would have hoped.
I realized, however, that this points out how little I understand about the video issues involved in making this work. Can you recommend a source that would better explain some of the issues involved?
-db-
18. februar 2010 21:49
A related question – is there a way that the file can be converted to something that is likely to play well on a PC without having the recipient install another program?
-db-
19. februar 2010 08:57
@David good that it is working for you
If you want to learn more about dslr and video try going here: http://www.cinema5d.com/index.php
Loads of info and help.
You can convert the video so it will playback nicely but do some reading on it since you can end up with very big files or loss of quality.
Again the cinema5d forum should be a very good resource for this.
//theis
23. december 2011 15:25
Thank You very much for this, didn’t work when i first tried it with vlc but after i changed my power settings on the computer it worked perfectly!