problems with vlc playback

[19sac65]

hi,new to the forum so excuse my possible ignorance
i have been downloading movies from various sources and playing them back on my tower with vlc with no issues
to save the hassle (and cost) of converting and burning to dvd i decided to buy a refurbed hp laptop and use that to browse and playback movies (through a 50" plasma) from my external 1tb HD
the tower is now just used for the dirty work
i installed vlc and most of the movies play perfectly and the sounds pretty good too
but probably 20% just show a pixelated screen and poor sound - even though when played on the tower they were perfect
ive plugged the HD back into the tower again to chack and theyre fine - just through the laptop
any ideas ?

[Hoser Rob]

I should mention that you won't get much help ... or sympathy ... here re. problems with warez video. It's against forum rules. And, while not as adamant as all that, I'm not all that sympathetic in general about problems with them either. They're generally crap quality to start with. Just terrible.

But here goes anyway ... what are the specs of the laptop? Which windows version? You need decent speed to play 1080p video. A single core CPU won't cut it. The version of vlc you installed may not work with older windows versions.

[hello_hello]

19sac65,
Try another media player. MPC-HC might be a good place to start. Also post the exact model of your laptop in order to determine what sort of CPU/GPU it has.

I'm not all that sympathetic in general about problems with them either. They're generally crap quality to start with. Just terrible.

Where do you get these ideas from?

You need decent speed to play 1080p video. A single core CPU won't cut it. The version of vlc you installed may not work with older windows versions.

Never heard of DXVA (hardware decoding)? Even the hardware decoder in my Android smartphone plays High Profile, Level 4.1, 1080p perfectly smoothly. With the right video player and a DXVA capable video card you should be able to play 1080p video without much CPU involvement at all. I've no idea if VLC supports DXVA but according to the system requirements listed on the VLC site it should run on any version of Windows from XP SP2 onwards.