this has been bugging me for a few weeks now. i'll fly, everything looks fine on the feed during the flight, land and pull the card and when i play back the files on my laptop its stuttery and choppy. not like every frame, more like every few seconds it just kind of hitches. the footage itself looks sharp and the exposure is fine its just this stutter thing.

tried different playback software and same result. thought maybe it was the microsd card getting old so i swapped it with a brand new samsung pro plus and same problem. at this point im a bit stumped. could be the drone itself? i havent updated firmware in a while i'll admit that

almost certainly a decoding issue on your laptop rather than the drone itself. what are your specs? h.265 footage especially at higher bitrates is pretty demanding and a lot of midrange laptops will choke on it even if the file is totally fine. try running it through handbrake and converting to h.264 first and see if the stutter goes away ? if it does, the footage is fine and you just need either a better player like VLC with gpu decoding enabled or to convert your workflow.

also definitely update the firmware anyway, not saying its causing this but its just good practice

yeah i had the exact same thing and it was my laptop struggling with the codec. DaVinci Resolve actually handled it way better than windows media player or whatever i was using before. might be worth trying if you haven't. and yeah update the firmware lol, no reason not to