Sound skipping when playing mkvs

[vaati]

Lately when I have been playing mkv videos the sound will stop for 1-2 seconds every so often and the continue. It doesn't go out of sync, it picks up from whatever you would hear at that point.

I'm not sure what is causing this because videos seemed to play fine until this week. Could it be the resolution of the videos? When I played a video in 1080 I got a consistent amount of skipping but when playing it in 720 there was very minimal. I used to play this videos directly from my external but now I move them to my Desktop to watch them. Does where they are have any effect on how well they will play?

When I opened task manager I noticed that CPU Usage stayed between 40-60% when playing the video.

I use Media Player Classic - Home Cinema.

System Information
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium (6.0, Build 6002)
System Model: Inspiron 1720 (Dell Laptop / approx. 4 years old)
BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1. 10 A04
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5250 @ 1.50GHz (2 CPUs), ~1.5GHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Page file: 1139MB used, 3190MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 11

Display Device
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
Chip Type: GeForce 8400M GS
DAC Type: Integrated RAMDAC
Approx. Total Memory: 880 MB
Current Display Mode: 1440 x 900 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Monitor: Generic PnP Monitor

[Alexstarfire]

Assuming these files are identical apart from the resolution then I'd say your computer doesn't have enough resources to play it. Could be that it can't read it fast enough from the HDD. Depends on bitrates for the video and audio. I only bring that up because you're on a laptop. That said, I don't have issues on my far inferior laptop.

Try SMPlayer. That's what I use and I don't have issues.

Also, is this across all MKVs, or only certain ones? If it's just specific ones then I'd check to see what kind of audio it uses.

[vaati]

I initially thought it was just certain mkvs but I went back to some older ones and I experienced it with them too. It's strange because up until now I had never had problem with these older ones.

I'll give SMPlayer a try. Thanks.

[Ai Haibara]

Have you updated any codecs, such as ffdshow, recently? Or your video and sound drivers (or DirectX, for that matter)?

[Bonie81]

it seems like broken codecs, i hv came across utility which fixes broken codec issues, but at this time of replying you i forget it's name. search here on Video Help in codec or utility section.

Try re-installing ac3 filter and haali media splitter again and hopefully this will start playing mkv fine again.