HD Video on a less than beefy computer

Organichu

Man what is up with playing high def. video on my laptop? I figured it might not be able to (it's a fairly run of the mil laptop, 2 gigs RAM, integrated graphics, 1.6 ghz dual core processor, etc.), but it... ok.

When I play regularly encoded video I'm ok.

Playing .mkv files it starts to work ok (and looks AMAZING)) but maybe every 5-15 seconds it stops to 'catch up' for a couple of seconds. I figure 'ok, makes sense, that's what I get for playing heavy duty files on a laptop'. But in task manager it shows my laptop as only using about 45% of its processing capacity, even with the video full-screened.

I also end all other processes.

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As an aside, assuming the answer is 'duh, how about you try playing it on something capable of playing it...'- do I have any recourse for burning to DVD and playing on my 360? If so would I have to convert away from .mkv? If so to that, what file type supported by the 360 would be the best quality?

ApexMirage

Are you playing these off a dvd? It sounds like a buffering issue. Try giving your page file some more space to work with, or copying the files to your hdd if they are in fact on a dvd.

Organichu

I am playing the files off my hdd.

ApexMirage

Juice up your page file?

proXimity

It's possible something else is accessing the hard drive and not letting it stream the movie fast enough. I know I've had the same problem playing HD movies, and with the probably slower laptop hard drive you have, that's probably the problem.

supabeast

What are you using to play the files? It’s my understanding that people have the best results using VLC to play the crazy high-end videos that get wrapped up in Matroska containers.

Organichu

I'm already using VLC.

How do I modify the page size?

proXimity

If the movie is already on the hard drive, changing the page size will do absolutely NOTHING, if not hurt performance more for watching video. You have plenty of ram, anyways.

Unknown

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Organichu

The bitrate is 6,900 kbps, the audio rate is another 768 kbps.

zilo

Still well below what a 5400rpm laptop hard drive should be able to handle (~16Mbps and up). It sounds like either cache thrashing or something spiking your CPU / hard drive at regular intervals. Try bringing up the graph in task manager and running a video, see what happens.