Lagging HD Video?

[paulh428]

Hey everybody. I recently bought a Radeon HD 2600XT 512MB card for my system. I've noticed my HD videos have started to lag a lot more now than in the beginning when it played HD movies pretty well without as much lag as it does now. I've downloaded the latest Catalyst driver. I was wondering whether there was something that could be done. I forgot to point out that my system is pretty old running on an 2.2 GHz Athlon 3700+ 64 processor. Not very fast or capable of playing HD movies. But since it played it so well when I first installed the video card, I was wondering whether there was anything I could do to fix the lag. By the way, the movies are only playing 720p. I dare not go to 1080p although my card is capable of playing it. If there really is no solution, what would be the fastest CPU (Socket 939) but cheapest to really play HD movies smoothly. Please, if there are any questions about my specs, please ask. Thanks.

[liambl]

That CPU and graphics card is plenty to play full HD videos without lag. What player are you using? Try using a different player. If you do want to upgrade your CPU you could get an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ dual core or similar that fits socket 939.

[paulh428]

Oh, really? I thought the CPU would be slow. I've had it for a couple years now. Anyways, I'm using VLC player which has been great for me so far. It's been playing every file. I would love to avoid buying a new CPU anyways. So thanks for your input and if that helped, please any further answers would be appreciated. Thanks!

[paulh428]

All right, so I'm using VLC Media player. It's been great but still been lagging in HD video. Any solutions? Codecs? Etc?

[liambl]

Why are you switching between both your threads on this subject? A mod might merge the threads. Do the movies look kinda blurry and not keep up with the sound?

[Alaron]

Let's stick to this thread for now since this is a better forum for it. Paul, in the future, please keep to one thread for the same issue. Thanks.

_Moderator_

[paulh428]

I apologize guys. Just wanted to get different answers from different people. Other than the CPU question. If you want to, you guys can delete the other threads. But to answer your question, yes, it is lagging or just kind of freezing a little. The audio is ok but video is not. Thanks.

[Masaki 7-11]

Since you are using VLC, there are a few options which should help increase video performance (I've been using VLC for my X1600XT system for well over a year). First of all make sure you have the latest version of VLC. Secondly go into the preferences tab under settings. Then go to the video section and turn advanced options on. Make sure you have overlay video output, skip frames, and drop late frames on. Then expand the video section and go to output modules. Change your output module to DirectX video output (OpenGL for Nvidia Graphics). Expand the output modules and got to the DirectX section and make sure you have video buffers in system memory off. Lastly when running VLC, go to task manager, and change the VLC process priority to realtime. This should make it so you can run your videos without any lag, perhaps even when using 1080p, just make sure you don't have any large processes running in the background.

[InfiniteGrim]

Thats odd, my hp pavillion could play 720p video with a mx440 with 64mb of video, it only had a 2.8 P4 with HT. Try VLC media player