Video lags

[warjo]

Hello i recently purchased a 37' LCD hdtv and it was yesterday that i tried to play a 720p movie (.mkv) on VLC.
Movie was smooth most of the times but it frequently had lag(like slowing down frames) for some seconds. What im thinking is that its probably my hardware spec and something needs an upgrade.. but im not exactly sure about that.
Want to hear it from you, if this is the problem and if is i would love to hear some recommended upgrades

I also heard about some Graphic Cards handling the hd process of a video without affecting your cpu. If that's true i would like some recommendations here also )
Thnx in advance

[Baldrick]

Your dual core 4800 athlon should be able to play 720p mkvs (with h264 I guess).

What do you play with ? I would try Media Player Classic Home Cinema or latest SMPlayer or latest VLC Media Player. Or if you want to play using windows media player then install ac3filter, haali media splitter and ffdshow.

[warjo]

Well i think its something about the scale, when i play on my 22 inch lcd computer monitor it plays just fine.
I notice lag on the 37 lc tv screen (also using hdmi cable). What i use is the VLC player.
What makes me worry is that on the lower inch monitor i can watch it just fine.

[Krispy Kritter]

Are you playing them at a higher resolution on the 37" LCD? That's the only thing that would make a difference. In which case, your cpu or video card is having issues. You can use task manager to verify your cpu usage during playback.

[jagabo]

If you are using your graphics card's video overlay feature it doesn't matter what the screen resolution is -- the video is decoded to 1280x720 buffer and the graphics card handles the scaling in hardware.

1280x720 at 60 Hz may be too much for an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with a single threaded h.264 decoder. Try using a multithreaded h.264 decoder like CoreAVC Pro.