MKV file plays in 720P, not in 1080P

[dacolajr]

The audio and video are out of synch on all MKV 1080P files but plays OK in 720P.
I'm thinking of installing Hali media Splitter or CoreAVC.

Do you think that's prudent? Any suggestions?

I have a new PC with NVidia Graphics card (64mb videoram) and 2Gb memory.
Currently connected to HDTV with DVI - HDMI cable.

thank you

[Nilfennasion]

Need more information than that.

"New PC" could mean anything. Presently, computers need very specific hardware in order to be able to successfully play back 1080P, leave alone stream it out to an external TV.

I suspect the use of a cable to convert the signal from DVI to HDMI is also a problem. It might be setting off the flag in one part of the hardware that prohibits 1080P playback except through pure HDMI.

[guns1inger]

64 MB video ram suggests strongly this is on-board video only, not a dedicated video card. This may also be contributing to your woes.

[jman98]

MKV (usually H.264 or X.264) at 1080p is difficult to play back on many PCs. You need the most powerful CPUs you can get. I'd recommend at least a dual core, but a quad core is better. Your video card will not be able to process any of the video (I'm not sure if any currently available video cards can really and truly process H.264 at this time), so it is making your CPU do all the work. There may not be anything you can do to "fix" this. Install Hali or CoreAVC if you wish, but my experience is that they won't help with your problem.

[dacolajr]

I have an HP DC7700 (small form factor). Not brand new but 6 months old.
It is Core 2 DUO and the NVidia card is an add-in.
I could get my hands on an ATI Graphics card with 256mb memory if it'll make a difference but I suspect probably not.
Guess I'll stick with 720P for awhile- it still looks pretty darn good.

Thank you all for the excellent input.

[jman98]

I could get my hands on an ATI Graphics card with 256mb memory if it'll make a difference but I suspect probably not.
Guess I'll stick with 720P for awhile- it still looks pretty darn good.

My experience is that it probably won't, as I stated in my comments in parenthesis in my earlier post. You might want to look either for an H.264 forum somewhere or maybe a forum specific to an Nvidia or ATI card and see what the experts are doing. I've read vague reports of people using hacked drivers to squeeze better performance out of H.264 on their PCs and perhaps there are some tricks you could try that we don't know about. H.264/X.264 playback of 1080p video is very problematic for many PCs. One last thing I thought of is that you could try installing the VLC Media Player. It's freeware. VLC contains its own codecs and there is no way to offload video processing to your video card whatever that card is, but sometimes VLC can play H.264 better than anything else can. Like I stated earlier your video card is certainly NOT doing any of the processing of the MKV files, which is why you're having issues playing 1080p video, so using VLC is certainly not any worse than what you're doing now.

[dacolajr]

Hey Jman98,

Thx for the tip on the VLC player. Improvement is much better over Zoom and Windows media player.
There is slight synch issues but it was somewhat viewable. at least i got to see a 1080P video.

CPU utilization peaked at 78% with only VLC playing - this definitely confirms your assessment.
I'll live with this till new PC purchase time rolls around again.

Thanks again
D