Playing x.264 content on Vista

[fotodude100]

I recently got a laptop with Vista Home Premium and AMD Turion X2 TL-56, 1GB (2x512MB) DDR2, Geforce 6150 Video.
I have acquired some x.264 720p movies that I wish to view.
I also decided to upgrade my memory to 2GB (2x1GB).

When playing the .mkv videos the playback is slightly choppy. It's not extreme, but it is annoying as I should get smooth playback. I use FFDshow and media player classic and have tried 2 different movies, "Fugitive" and "Starship Troopers".
After experimenting with different ram configurations and disabling some windows services, I have found that using 512MB ram plays the videos flawlessly while any other config does not. I've tried all, including the above configs and 1 stick of 1GB ram as well.

How can this be, as I don't want to run Vista with just 512MB of ram for other programs?

Anyone have any ideas how this can be, and how I can change it so it will work with 2GB ram?

[edDV]

Have you tried the VLC player ?

[redwudz]

I think you have a problem somewhere. You might try VLC media player. It uses a fair amount more of CPU power than MPC, but it might tell you if you have a codec problem as it uses it's own codecs.

It might be MPC settings or something with ffdshow. But I don't have much experience with either. Maybe other members can give you some tips with those programs. I have Vista Premium on two computers and I haven't noticed any playback problems with H.264 with 2GB RAM.

One suggestion I've seen is The Core Media Player for H.264 video. Probably less CPU overhead than VLC.

And welcome to our forums.

[Soopafresh]

Yup, try VLC. If that doesn't do it, install CoreAVC and Haali Media splitter. Core is the best and lowest CPU intensive h264 decoder.

[Nelson37]

You are physically removing the RAM sticks to lower the memory?

And it works BETTER with LESS RAM?

Do you have two 512 sticks, in two slots? Can you use one stick in either slot, and if so is there any difference between 512 MB in slot one and 512MB in slot two? Have you tried both sticks individually?

If this were a tested, well-known OS like XP, I would strongly suspect a problem with an individual memory stick or slot on the board. With Vista, this could very well be a bug.

While I have seen progs which work better with less RAM, this is quite rare. More common with a laptop, their architecture is often highly customized.

[fotodude100]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try VLC. And thanks for the welcome.

Yes, Nelson37, I am physically removing the ram sticks to lower the memory. It's easy to do, and I had remembered smooth playback with the movies previously, before I installed the 2GB ram configuration. So, since that was the only hardware change I had made to the laptop, that is what I decided to troubleshoot.
I build computers in my spare time. I have about 5 of them. This is one of the most perplexing riddles I have seen in quite a while. You're also right about laptops being highly customized as it's my first laptop and I entered the Bios to make changes and it's very limited in what you can change. It's an HP dv9410ca, btw.

[Nelson37]

My brother had a similar laptop where the second memory slot was flaky. The chip in it would be "lost" while the PC was running, this happened at very irregular intervals for quite a while. Then it started to happen more often. Finally determined this by removing all memory, then individually loading each slot and finding that one slot did not function, 90% of the time.

This same test would most likely not have found anything 30 to 60 days earlier, as the slot was functioning normally approximately 90% of the time.

Just curious if this might be related to your issue, unfortunately if it is in the early stage as described above it may be nearly impossible to find.

[redwudz]

Thinking of memory, are you absolutely sure that added memory is 100% compatible with your motherboard and your existing RAM modules? I assume you already checked this, but that might explain the odd memory behavior.

It appears to be DDR2 PC2-5300. I found this at Crucial Memory: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Pavilion%20dv9410ca

[Heywould3]

i have been running into the same issue. i have H264 files resulution of 1080P 1 hour epesodes of a mini series i love.. anyway, in XP it plays flawlessly but in vista on same computer it will glitch for a second every now and then. mainly durring fast motion. but its fairly random. my cpu usage is ave 50% but gets as low as 10. never hits 100% so its a vista thing. i have tried all i can think of. VLC MPclassic MP11 Powerdvd7 and a few others.. they all do it.when it glitches its not the cpu its gotta be the throughput either mem or HDD cuz cpu stays low.

also in XP the cpu usage is almost 0 my 8600 has hardware exceleration for H264 so thats to be expected. the drivers for my video card are as new as possible for vista and xp but they are different builds.

you can see my pc specs in profile. its not my setup its mostlikly driver and vista.. oh i dont have anf codec packs loaded. only the min.. xvid ac3 divx/xvid and Haali spliter