Should my laptop be able to play movies of this quality?

riniks92

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Feb 3, 2009
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I've tried to play some movies on my HP Pavillion15-ac020na, they turn out to be unwatchable, lag too much with artefacts everywhere. Is it that I shouldn't expect the laptop to play movies of such quality or does the issue reside elsewhere?

The videos files:
1 ''1080p MPEG-4 AVC 24955 kbps 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
DTS-HD Master Audio English 5.1 / 48 kHz / 2858 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1509 kbps / 24-bit)''
2 ''1920x816, AVC, 25 fps, 11 727 kbps
DTS / 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1 536 kbps / 24-bit''

Laptop Tech specs
Intel® Core™ i3-5005U with Intel HD Graphics 5500 (2 GHz, 3 MB cache, 2 cores)
4 GB DDR3L SDRAM (1 x 4 GB)
1 TB 5400 rpm SATA

Player is vlc 2.2.2

 
Solution
That laptop should have no problem playing those movies.

Make sure your power profile is set to balanced or high performance. Sometimes people accidentally set it to low power / power saver, and can't figure out why the computer is so slow. Click the battery icon in the lower right.

If your hard drive is close to full, or if you've been using bittorrent a lot, defragment the drive. If the movie file is badly fragmented, the hard drive may not be able to read it fast enough to keep up with the movie's play speed. In your bittorrent app, look for an option to pre-allocate files you're downloading. If you don't set that option, it writes every chunk it downloads to a different place on the HDD, badly fragmenting it.

Have you tried...
That laptop should have no problem playing those movies.

Make sure your power profile is set to balanced or high performance. Sometimes people accidentally set it to low power / power saver, and can't figure out why the computer is so slow. Click the battery icon in the lower right.

If your hard drive is close to full, or if you've been using bittorrent a lot, defragment the drive. If the movie file is badly fragmented, the hard drive may not be able to read it fast enough to keep up with the movie's play speed. In your bittorrent app, look for an option to pre-allocate files you're downloading. If you don't set that option, it writes every chunk it downloads to a different place on the HDD, badly fragmenting it.

Have you tried a different player than VLC? It's very good, but occasionally they fall behind or don't fully implement certain codecs, resulting in dropouts. Install either CCCP or K-Lite standard (do NOT install both - pick one). Then try playing the movie with either Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic. These will take more CPU than VLC to play the same movie, but any i3 or modern Pentium/Celeron should be able to do 1080p.

http://www.cccp-project.net/
http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
 
Solution