Be Excellent To Each Other

I've got a (perfectly legally obtained conversion from my genuine blu ray disc - Ed) mkv h264 1080p file on my PC and in VLC it tends to pause occasionally with the sound continuing. In media player, the sound sync is all over the place. The video seems to speed up a bit now and then but in VLC the sound is always spot on.

I have an AMD Athlon X2 3800 chip in the machine and a geforce 7300 gfx card.

Come to think of it though, why am I trying to get 1080p playback when I can only manage 1280 width on this screen?

Ah it's because I wanted HD Fifth Element and closest I could get is a 1080p version without having to suffer hardcoded dutch subtitles.

The answer was probably no anyway. 720P, which you have the screen for? Just about.

VLC is a bloody good player when for whatever reason it's struggling to keep a feed up but there's a limit to what it can do, even on my Core 2 Duo (2x2.4ghz) it struggles a little with 1080P stuff.

My screen is capable of 1080i and has a native res of 1360*768. Except over VGA it can only manage 1280*768 disappointingly.

It's not capable of 1080i.

It might understand it as an input, but for at least one very obvious reason it's not capable of displaying it. 2 reasons if it's an LCD.

It claims to have a 1080i output mode.. but it is really just making 1080i 720p, true.

My new and improved almighty system of an Athlon X2 4200+ and a Cirrus Logic 5446 compatible graphics card can play 720p video. Although I have just found out my sound card appears to be "missing" which may help it out a bit.

What codec are you using for playback?

My P4 3GHz is quite capable of playing back HD depending on the codec, remembering I use quite heavy duty editing codecs on it. Although my monitor res isn't quite HD, it still correctly scales it.

VLC can be a bitch and I gave up trying to use it for professional use. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it hogs CPU resources, can't find codecs or complains files are broken. It's a tool not a player. I mainly use Media Player on the PC and Quicktime Pro on the Mac (with a Windows Media decoder installed). And this is from someone who works with video every day.

Sorry I see you've specified the codec. H264 can be quite heavy going. Do you know what the bitrate is? Have you measured CPU use?

cpu usage when playing gets to about 55-60. I've never seen it higher than 50 before. Media player just messes up the sound too much. Can I convert this to another format and make it easier to play without losing quality?

Sometimes bitrate seems to jump above 10 mbps but is mostly 8mbps

You're running out of CPU then. Your CPU is dual core, meaning it's really like to CPUs glued together; hence 50% usage is actually one of those two processors running flat out.

One of the recent production nVidia driver releases has known issues with stuttering video. Get the latest drivers if you haven't already.

Erm, depends on the OS. On my Mac it's not unusual to see processes taking up 100% upwards of CPU time. Think the highest I saw was around 300%, or 3 cores of my 8 core box.

Tried Windows Media? Most Windows graphics cards have acceleration and stuff for WMV files that improve playback and reduce CPU usage. One of my problems with WMV playback under Parallels on the Mac is you lose this so are stuck with higher than usual CPU usage for Windows Media playback.

That's just a different way of representing the same thing though of course.

On previous attemps to convert to this, the sound has ended up as just white noise. I'll try another converter.

Yeah I'm talking about single threaded apps, of course. I am unaware of any H264 decoders for Win32 that run multiple threads, though I could be wrong.

I've found a converter that will convert to WMV properly now. On the sample of the file it worked okay, I'll just have to see how the full thing works.