How to Play dvd/bluray rips from hard drive without jerkiness

[audioresearch]

In general, is a tower computer with a fairly current, fairly fast video card better for playing ripped dvds and blurays from hard drive without "jerkiness" in the picture than a fairly new laptop?

Which aspects of the computer have the most to do with how smoothly the video plays back: amount of memory, cpu speed, quality of video card or video portion of motherboard (if video is built in to the motherboard only)?

[Kerry56]

You failed to mention software. For example, many people use the free media player VLC for playback of DVD video, but I've never found it to be quite as smooth as one of the commercial programs, Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater. TMT is also better for Blu-ray. Unfortunately, TMT is no longer for sale.

[jagabo]

In general, is a tower computer with a fairly current, fairly fast video card better for playing ripped dvds and blurays from hard drive without "jerkiness" in the picture than a fairly new laptop?

Even a budget desktop computer is capable of playing blu-ray without jerkiness. Unless your laptop is bottom of the barrel it shouldn't have problems either. Something is set up incorrectly.

[Seeker47]

No need to limit this to using a computer. I routinely play back movies from a WD-Live player, which files are playing back from an attached portable HDD, with no real-time computer involvement at all. These are sometimes DVD structures that have been copied to the portable drive, or else .MKVs, .AVI files, etc. Haven't done any Blu-Rays this way yet, but I probably could. So far, jerky playback has not been an issue. It is typically as good or better than live-streaming, as you'd see from Netflix. If the files are at higher than DVD resolution, this can also be better looking than what you'd get from NF, Hulu, etc.

[redwudz]

I've been using VMP Media player for a couple of years. It seems to work well with BD commercial discs and MKV backup of the same.
I do have AnyDVDHD running in the background.
I've used VLC, but it does require a bit of CPU power. VSO seems to work better. And you might try some of the other software players.