HD video plays very choppy on my computer

[Pollochicken]

HD video plays really choppy on my computer and I know that it may be that my computer isn't fast enough to play HD video, but I would think it would be. The processor speed is over 2 GHz, I have 1.5 GB's of ram, and a new ATI Radeon x1600 video card.

Like I said, whenever I try to play HD videos, the video is very choppy and unwatchable. I would just assume that my computer isn't good enough except that I can watch the exact same videos on my friends computers and laptops which have much lower specs than mine. Even when I close out of all nonessential programs, the videos still will not play well. Is there anything that I can actually do which might help HD videos play better?

[Baldrick]

What kind of HD? HDV, MPEG2 HD, H264 HD, MOV HD, 720p, 1080p? or?
What player(s) are you using?

720p MPEG2 HD should work pretty good but you might get problems with H264 and VC-1 HD.

[Pollochicken]

I use WMP11, Video Lan, or Quicktime as my video players, depending on the file format. Regardless of whether I'm watching 720p movie trailers in Quicktime, or AVI or WMV video files in other players, it seems to just be really choppy. Most of my files seem to be encoded with xvid, but beyond that I really don't know anything.

[jman98]

I have an AMD 3200+ CPU and I have some issues with HD video. Perhaps this will be of some help to you.

H.264 or its variants (X.264) doesn't play well on my PC unless I use the free VLC Media Player. This type of video is basically unwatchable without VLC Media Player.

My screen display maxes out at something like 1200x1000 (I have forgotten the exact numbers, but that's close). 1080 video is a problem for me. I think it's because my monitor has to scale it back to 720 to display it. My video card is part of the motherboard and it's something like GeForce 4, which is fairly old technology.

720p plays fine on my PC. Divx, WMV, MPEG - no problems. H.264 has the same issues as above - I have to use the VLC Media Player or it's unwatchable - too jerky.

If your monitor resolution is well below 1080 like mine, there may be some video downscaling issues at work. Perhaps your friends have either higher resolution monitors or much faster CPUs.

[edDV]

MPeg4 (Divx, xvid) gets little if any boost from the video card. It's all about the CPU. I can play WMV-HD at 720p with my 2.4GHz P4 and a simple ATI 9550 display card but it is on the edge for smoothness and CPU is near pegged.

MPeg4 h.264 has some specific driver support for the x1600 but you need to get the correct driver and player configuration. A 2GHz CPU may still be the bottleneck. The x1600 maxes at 720p for h.264 even with a fast CPU with current drivers.

MPeg2_TS should get a decent amount of acceleration with the x1600 if the player is properly configured to take advantage of hardware.

Lowest common denominator for playback is VLC. Default configuration is to play 1080i MPeg2-TS from one field (discard) and uses CPU only. Full 1080i with deinterlace on takes more CPU power to play. It is possible to configure VLC to take advantage of your hardware but that gets advanced. Better to use a player that autoconfigures like later versions of PowerDVD.

Bottom line, your CPU is the main bottleneck.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Some other thoughts:

Are you playing the videos from your main system drive?

Do you have integrated audio? (This saps a lot of CPU power....)