Pixel 2 XL videos will not play correctly on my Windows PC? Help?

[Andrea Roman]

I recently bought a Pixel 2 XL in hopes of taking amazing pictures and videos for a trip (spoilers, it did just that!), but upon plugging my phone into my Windows PC to transfer my pictures and videos, I found that the videos I transferred weren't playing back correctly on my PC. My PC isn't very old. It's an Acer that I bought last year for college after my old Toshiba gave out. It's perfectly capable of playing all my other videos, including videos taken on my old LG, but for some reason it can't play videos taken on my Pixel 2 XL.

There are a handful of videos that do in fact play smoothly with no problem, but for 80% of them they play as if I took them in slow-motion, and often lag or seem corrupted with pixels taking up the screen, which is funny because all the videos I actually took in slow-motion play correctly. I went online and played the videos through photos.google.com on my PC, and they played perfectly fine. Same with my phone, they play fine on my "Photos" app. I decided to see if maybe they just became corrupted during the transfer and downloaded a video straight from my Photos account onto my PC, and the same problem occurred where it wouldn't play correctly. So I know the files are not corrupted.

I swept through some other forums and did what many suggested, download VLC, but VLC actually did even worse when I tried playing a video - it couldn't even play it! Windows could at least give me some sort of a video, VLC wasn't even willing to try.

I'm kind of stuck here. I don't know why only like 10 of my videos were willing to play correctly and the rest were garbage. Has anyone else had this problem? I couldn't find much information on this online. All the videos are in MP4 format. Some are taken vertical, some horizontal. Videos taken with the front "selfie" camera are fine, as well as videos taken in slow-motion. Any help would be appreciated. I don't know what to do. If anyone wants to see the videos or perhaps screenshots of anything, don't hesitate to ask. I'm actually a bit curious to see if the videos appear corrupted if I upload them on here? Hm. Please Help.

 

[Rukbat]

Just an educated guess, but something in your PC is corrupting MP4 files as they load off the hard drive. Where or why? That could take weeks of work to find. (Or it could be malware. I'd run a thorough Malwarebytes scan, then a thorough virus scan. [Then leave both programs running, to catch future garbage.])

 

[TraderGary]

If it's a recently purchased Acer computer I'm assuming it is running Windows 10.
Have you made certain that you've done all the Windows 10 and Acer driver updates?

 

[Andrea Roman]

It is running Windows 10. I did recently update it too. Everything is up to date, but I'm still having this problem.

 

[Andrea Roman]

I downloaded Quick Time to see if it did any better, and it did, but still made the video seem as if it was playing in slow-motion.

 

[TraderGary]

Have you tried contacting Acer to check if you have the latest video driver(s)?

 

[Photo_Drew]

why not just play it thru photos? do you need to have the hard copy on the drive? if it works fine thru photos why hassle with trying to get the download to play?

 

[vzwuser76]

There is a player called something like MPC or something like that. It's very similar to VLC, but some controls are different (like on VLC the play/pause are one button, bit on the MPC player they're separate). But I have found that some files that VLC has issues with, MPC plays them just fine. So maybe give it a shot.

 

[Andrea Roman]

There is a player called something like MPC or something like that. It's very similar to VLC, but some controls are different (like on VLC the play/pause are one button, bit on the MPC player they're separate). But I have found that some files that VLC has issues with, MPC plays them just fine. So maybe give it a shot.

I tried it out and it played the video the same way Quick Time did, unfortunately. Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[Andrea Roman]

Have you tried contacting Acer to check if you have the latest video driver(s)?

No, but I'm going do that. My computer was up to date with Windows, but perhaps it's an Acer driver that's the problem. Thanks!

 

[Andrea Roman]

why not just play it thru photos? do you need to have the hard copy on the drive? if it works fine thru photos why hassle with trying to get the download to play?

With my last phone, I would often take videos and upload them to my laptop in order to edit them or make new videos with them. I had the same intentions with this phone because the camera is much better. This comment had me thinking because I hadn't actually tried using the videos in my editing software yet. I was curious, so I tried it, and the video played PERFECTLY! I'm baffled. To take it even further, I published the video through my editing software, and the video played normally after that. I guess this is one solution, however, I just want to watch these videos on my computer without having to process each one of them every time. Also some of them are family videos, and it'd be such a hassle to actively search for these videos every time I wanted to watch them. Any ideas on why it played normally after being processed vs. just being played through a video player?

 

[LeoRex]

To me, that sounds like a CODEC problem on your PC. All this videos are often given the same extension, but there are countless varieties of formats for those files... And many need to have updated libraries to play them. If your computer doesn't support the format Google is using, it may not play, or you may get a black screen, or no audio, etc.

The reason the processed videos work is that when you saved the new video, it encoded that video in a format that the player understood (those video codecs control both the creation and playback)

In a perfect world, those various CODECs would be updated automatically, as they are published.. but that sadly is not the case. I have fits dealing with the dozens of video formats that I have stored over the years...

Good news is that there are CODEC packs that you can install that should include pretty much everything. Just make sure you get it from a reputable source. The Pixel records in H.264 MP4 format. Guessing if you load up a video in that format from another device, you'll have the same problems.