THETA viewer vs GOPRO viewer for 4K videos

I have found that my W10 juicy Alienware laptop setup plays 4k videos in the Theta viewer in a jerky fashion in the first play through. If I play it again, it is smooth. My computer guys think it is an idiosyncrasy of the Theta viewer software. This lead me to explore other viewers and I find myself very pleased with the GoPro viewer. It starts with a less wide-angle presentation, and therefore less distortion but is easily mouse-wheel scrolled to differing widenesses. It is smooth throughout. The 64 bit version is downloaded free but it requires a couple of extra .dll files pasted into the files list. Easy enough to do but aggravating. If your Theta viewer is giving you problems, maybe you want to check this out too.

How long are the 360 degree videos that you’re viewing?

Hi Jesse,

Thanks for helping with this. The test videos in 4K are 20 seconds long. 147 MB in the _er file version. I should have mentioned that we need the Theta programme to process the basic MP4 into that _er format, whatever that is, before playing it in GoPro. Theta’s jerky first-playing is in full-screen mode. Second playing is smooth. Task Manager on W10 shows no GPU use and only 25% CPU use and about 280 MB memory use. Does that help?

Cheers, Rob

Hi Jesse,

Thanks for helping with this. The test videos in 4K are 20 seconds long. 147 MB in the _er file version. I should have mentioned that we need the Theta programme to process the basic MP4 into that _er format, whatever that is, before playing it in GoPro. Theta’s jerky first-playing is in full-screen mode. Second playing is smooth. Task Manager on W10 shows no GPU use and only 25% CPU use and about 280 MB memory use. Does that help?

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