Whenever I try to skip around in a very large video file the sound will go out of sync. It does not matter what player I use, or how far I move around in the file, the sound will become disjointed by a factor of a few fractions of a second or more. This is very annoying. I hope that I do not have to watch every video all of the way to the point I wish to see, rather than skiping ahead.
Strange. Both the video and the audio are transmitted as streams of packets (one stream is for video, the other is for audio). Each packet has a timestamp associated with it which tells the software when to broadcast that packet’s data. In other words, the two streams should be perfectly sychronized by the timestamps on the packets. It sounds like a programming bug to me.
Except that it happens with every video player I have tried.
They all just seem to go a little screwey when the file size goes beyond 50 MB.
Don’t worry Muad’dib, that same thing happens on my computer. I found out that to fix it, just press the pause button and a second later unpause it. I don’t know why, but it seems to let the video catch up with the audio. Reply here if that works.
Nope, does not help.
How much video memory do you have? Often it’s the sound that is ahead of the video, and not vice versa. Try closing other programs you have running and pausing it for 10 or 15 seconds, not ‘just a second’, and then see if it works. Also make sure you are up to date on all of your codecs and media player versions.
You’ve got me curious now. Is it just one format that’s doing this (e.g. RealMedia, QuickTime, Windows Media)? I’m in the streaming engineering field so I might be able to help.
Some files that large have the sound off a bit in the file.
This is quite common in camcordered movies in the .avi file format. TTT.
Because light is faster than sound? 
I might add that the same thing happens to me (when say, I’m playing a movie in .AVI or .MPG format).
It seems to primarily be a problem with AVI files.