The hands down world’s best free video player has keyboard shortcuts for syncing audio on the fly. Who would have thought, and who thought well indeed…
Worse than even hard-coded subtitles or footage captured by an aisle mounted, cheap handicam in a Vladivostok multiplex, out of sync audio beats all other irritations hands down in its efficacy to ruin a movies’ viewing pleasure.
Admittedly, out of sync audio is often a sure sign that you sourced your filmic pleasure from somewhere far left of legitimate, but there are also many above board, non-pirated reasons why your video and audio may less than harmoniously matched; a poor conversion from NTSC to PAL—the length of an audio track not adjusted for the decrease in framerate per second from 29.97 to 25—one of the more common.
Enter the hands down world’s best free video player to the rescue: VLC.
Those in the know have always known that VLC could adjust the synchronisation of the audio in a video track being played (screenshot below)—there is an offset value in milliseconds for such in the advanced audio preferences of the application—but doing so has often been a painful process of trial and error—guess an approximate value, restart the movie, see if the audio has become more or less in sync and then try again until, like trying to use a hammer in the dead of night, you hit the nail, and yourself, on the head.
Painful, thumb-crushing hammer blows no more, for VLC has keyboard shortcuts for adjusting audio synchronisation, and you can do so on-the-fly:
VLC Keyboard Shortcuts for Audio Synchronisation
Mac: F and G
Windows: J and K
I am with you on out-of-synch audio, even a fraction out is so annoying. VLC looks great! Can this be embedded in a Word Press blog as the default video player?
If so, how? Or if not, if VLC is on the Mac could an out of synch video be downloaded, synched correctly and saved and uploaded?
Hi Pavitrata. While in theory VLC can be used to stream video (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/streaming.html), it’s better known as a desktop application, and if you are wanting to embed/serve video in a WordPress blog I would instead recommend Alex Rabe’s WordTube plugin. While it’s perhaps better known for it’s playlist functionality, WordTube gives you a very simple and easy to use interface for uploading and managing, not to mention playing back invdividual videos on a WP blog, and you can customise the look of it by downloading skins from JWPlayer.
As for syncing out of sync video permanently (as opposed to just during playback), you really need Final Cut for this—sometimes the audio track just needs to have it’s in point changed by a second here or there—but if the syncing gets goes out increasingly through the length of the track (which is what will happen with a bad conversion from NTSC to PAL for example), you may also want to make use of an audio editor like Soundtrack Pro’s stretch or compress feature, to adjust the length of your audio track to fit the video.
Hope that helps.
Thank you so much! We had a version of a movie where it was about 3 seconds out of sync and this helped sooo much!!
I was almost in tears when I got it perfect – partly because it had been annoying me for ages and partly because its such simple way to fix it!
Thank you again!
Thanks Emily. Now if only I there was a keyboard shortcut to remove the sound of someone eating popcorn from the dodgy R5 release I am watching at the moment!
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thanks, mate! i was fiddling with -3 or +4 in the settings… with your screenshot and the shortcut you saved my night
cheers from austria! gallo
@gallo You wouldn’t get anywhere with 0.003 of a second! Glad I could be of some help, hope you enjoyed the movie.
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I’m not sure your mac shortcuts are right? F is full screen and G does nothing? Would really like to get these! thanks
@lloydy, “Command-F” is full screen, try “F” + “G” without Command and I think you should be there…
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