Wrong forum, but for those who mess around with Computers.

ib042129 · Aug 21, 2008

Did you ever try to play HD files on a slightly older machine?

I got a Pentium 4 2.8GHz, and that should technically be enough CPU
speed to play a 720P movie, but the result is either choppy is I play using
VLC, or if I use Media Player Classic the sound runs way ahead of the picture.

I found a few articles online about pleople setting up computers to play HD and they use much slower machines (like a 2.2GHz).

SmrPants44 · Aug 21, 2008

ib042129 said:
Did you ever try to play HD files on a slightly older machine?

I got a Pentium 4 2.8GHz, and that should technically be enough CPU
speed to play a 720P movie, but the result is either choppy is I play using
VLC, or if I use Media Player Classic the sound runs way ahead of the picture.

I found a few articles online about pleople setting up computers to play HD and they use much slower machines (like a 2.2GHz).

where are you getting the movies from? bittorrent etc? case with files like that you cant be absolutely sure they werent compressed by someone on the line to make it easier to upload. I would try getting something you know is super high quality from somewhere and seeing how that works.

Also, when it comes to graphics intensive things like that, more important than cpu speed is your video card. How old is your video card and whats the buffer size on it?

ib042129 · Aug 21, 2008

SmrPants44 said:
where are you getting the movies from? bittorrent etc? case with files like that you cant be absolutely sure they werent compressed by someone on the line to make it easier to upload. I would try getting something you know is super high quality from somewhere and seeing how that works.

Also, when it comes to graphics intensive things like that, more important than cpu speed is your video card. How old is your video card and whats the buffer size on it?

Hm. Well that's the thing about a video card. It's not 3D so I would think that a video card is not all that important.
But, that computer has two of them. Is integrated video. THe other is a NVidia GForce FX (Forgot which model.) I think it has a 128Mb of memory.
(The thing is, because it's an older Dell, the video card is a PCI slot not AGP not PCI express. But I would think that it's not all that important.)

nexTOme · Aug 21, 2008

sound/screen sync issue- either codec is wrong, or original file is corrupted i think

rest of the problem - i dont know

what i know - your computer spec is not part of the problem, unless your video card is wayyy outdated or have like less than a gig memory available

ib042129 · Aug 21, 2008

nexTOme said:
sound/screen sync issue- either codec is wrong, or original file is corrupted i think

rest of the problem - i dont know

what i know - your computer spec is not part of the problem, unless your video card is wayyy outdated or have like less than a gig memory available

That's the thing. I played the exactly same file on my laptop (1.8 Core Duo.)
And the thing plays fine. So the file is ok.

is there a way to reincode the file to use some less compact but faster format?

WillT. · Aug 21, 2008

Try going to free-codecs.com and downloading all of the codecs that you think you might need, or just get one of their packages. You're video components may also be limiting the quality of playback. You should probably make sure that you have all of the latest video drivers installed on you computer, too.

nexTOme · Aug 21, 2008

gomplayer FTW! stressfree all codec automatically downloaded

SmrPants44 · Aug 21, 2008

if you can play the file fine on another computer the problem is probably codec related. If you go here you can download a program called video inspector that analyzes the video file and tells you which codecs you need to play it.

ib042129 · Aug 24, 2008

The codec for those HD files turned out to be H264. Which is aparently very slow to decode. So maybe that is the reason the video was either choppy or laggy.

I have been trying to convert it to DivX or XVid, but had no luck so far, I think I might just be missing some decoders for it though.