Laggy HD Movies

[frozenlead]

Okay. Glad to see the major problem was resolved.

Now we may be running into a processing power limit. Try playing the video with VLC media player.

 

[nineine]

I just played it in vlc media player and the video is playing much smoother in it than any other player ive used. It still not as smooth as it should be and it lags every little while and I see some square artifacts show up when it lags(kinda like the squares you see on streaming videos) but it is a much better frame rate than the other players. I still wouldnt call this watchable framerate wise but its not far from it. However it is in wmv format and when I open it in vlc it says "No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "wmap". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this." Because of this there is no audio at all while playing it.

 

[frozenlead]

Okay, so you'll lose some performance with other players - we've ruled out the player as a major problem point. Let's work on efficiency, now. What kinds of things do you have running in the background? I see on your idle CPU temp shot, you've got a good 20% each core in use. What's doing work, there?

 

[nineine]

That wasnt my idle cpu shot. The was minor usage. I was recording a radio show using adobe audition. When Idle my cpu usage fluctuates from 0 - 5%. All i have running is kaspersky, pc tools spyware and the hp software that came with the system.
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3728/idle.jpg

 

[frozenlead]

Consider shutting down some of your programs, and then run only a media player. See if that improves things a bit.

 

[nineine]

Ive shut down everything and the performance in the media player hasnt changed. :/

 

[frozenlead]

The only other possibility I can think of is that your notebook simply doesn't have enough power to get the job done.

 

[nineine]

What kind of power does a system need in order to have good performance while playing hd video? What should I upgrade in my laptop to make it powerful enough, the video card or cpu? And do you know what my best options would be to do that in this laptop(ie. most powerful cpu/video card it supports)? Btw I really appreciate all the time you have put in to help me out. I wouldnt have gotten this far without you.

 

[sharr]

i dont really think it is the "raw power" that is the issue here. i have a T7200 @ 2.00 Ghz with a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120 graphics card and 1080p HD movies STILL frame ... and i did try everything from cleaning it, shutting down every program running in the background, all the known players. the only thing i found to be really helping is changing the drivers for the graphics card, which improved the performance just a little bit. Bottom line, i think some HD movies (1080p encoded ones at least) just cant be played on a laptop.

 

[frozenlead]

Sharr, your argument is really saying that raw power is the issue.

I have a T8100 @ 2.1GHz and an 8800mGTX and I can play movies fine.

I'm not really sure how GPU dependent playing HD movies are - something I'll try and find on the ole' internet. I'll post when I find something.

 

[frozenlead]

Yeah, I don't think it's raw power.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-blu-ray-video,2030-9.html

Tom's gets an older Sempron to play back flawlessly with some ruddy graphics cards.


It's got to do something with the player or the compression codec. What player are you using and what are you trying to decode?

 

[sharr]

Windows Media Player classic is my main player and the problems i am having are with all kinds of 1080p movies. for example, i cant watch the movie trailers from apple in 1080p. the trailers are laggy. i have no problem with 480p or 720p trailers thou. it isnt a LCD problem since i have 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200) LCD Screen.

 

[frozenlead]

From what I hear media player can't do certain kinds of HD playback - but I'm no expert in the matter, I've no blueray player myself - just HD video files.

Have you tried another commercial player (with a free trial)?

 

[sharr]

same here, HD files. to be honest, i dont really know any other players besides the "classic" ones, windows media player 10, media player classic, vlc player, quick time. i never bothered with others because i never had any problems with the movies until the HD 1080p files came out.

 

[carl84uk]

If anyone has this problem still vlc player does seem to go laggy and blocky on my acer 6920 with a 9500m gs graphics card after hours worth of messing around with codecs i figured out how to get around this issue, first install the CCCP codec pack once this is installed just open windows media player that comes with windows 7 then the movies work fine, its the VLC player that is the problem maybe due the the gfx card not being that powerfull because i have a 8800gt in my pc and it works straight off with just VLC player idont have to install the CCCP codec pack on my pc. I think that he CCCP codec pack gives movies better performance if you have a lower end card, these codecd performance packs dont seem to be needed on high end cards they just do all the work with their high rate bandwidth.