I have a series of H264 videos that I'm having trouble playing on either SMPlayer or VLC, although they have different problems on both.

VLC gives the codec details as H264 - MPEG4 AVC (Part 10)
960x540, Framerate 59.94. Audio: MPEG AAC audio (mp4a)

In VLC, in plays normally (although slightly too fast), but any attempt to skip forward causing the picture to freeze, although the progress bar keeps playing.

In SMPlayer, the video plays twice as fast but the audio stays normal, so immediately de-syncs. Reducing the play speed to 0.6 makes the video okay, but the sound goes really slow, deep and distorted. But it does play and seek through okay; however because the video is now normal speed and sound slow, immediate desync'ing occurs.

If I try to convert the video to something else, Avidemux wants to index the file, but produces another video going twice as fast with desync'ed audio.

Are there any options I can use in SMplayer to perhaps slow down the frame rate by dropping frames, thus keeping the playing time but with fewer frames? There is a feature for this in Avidemux, but it doesn't have any effect on the speed of the completed video.

Or does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thank you for any help you can give.

Steve

That framerate ist really odd. 24, 25 or even 30 are some more common ones. I don't know about VLC but I would imagine that the video really was recorded with 24/25/30 frames/s and the information about the framerate is wrong. That would explain mplayer playing it twice as fast as supposed to. (And Avidemux producing such too fast videos.)
For mencoder the -ofps parameter seems to be able to reduce the framerate of the output video and -fps the one of the input video. Other options seem to be codec-specific. See http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html.