Why can't I play HD video?

May 10, 2006 9:30 AM

Why can't my fairly powerful system play HD video content? When ever I try, the audio works fine but the video stutters and lags behind.

My system:

AMD 3000+ XP Processor
1GB RAM
GeForce 6600GT 128MB
Running at 1024x768
5.1 Sound

Now, it may not be the best machine in the world, but if I can play Half Life 2 at 1024x768 smoothly, surely I can watch a 720p video file? Microsoft seems to agree. Any suggestions?

posted by Orange Goblin to computers & internet (19 comments total)

can you open up task manager, report back with cpu usage and memory usage while your trying to play the video
posted by killyb at 9:33 AM on May 10, 2006

WMP uses 70-100% CPU and 50-60MB of RAM. I guess the CPU is a bottleneck, but it seems like it shouldn't be, from the Microsoft specs.
posted by Orange Goblin at 9:40 AM on May 10, 2006

Where is the file you are trying to play? An internal hard drive? An external USB or firewire drive?

What program are trying to play it with? The default video players on Windows are not always the best, although I have not looked to deeply into alternatives recently.

I am pretty sure Half Life takes over your whole machine so it can maximize resources. If you have other programs running, they may be using cycles that your media player needs.
posted by mzurer at 9:41 AM on May 10, 2006

70-100% on your machine seems kinda high. I don't know of other media players that will take advantage of hd content...can you try it on another machine? Is this something you have the ability to send to me if there isn't another computer to try it on? Make sure the location your playing it from isn't something slow, like a cd or slower usb drive. Is there anything else in the process list which is trying to, or is using extra cycles?
posted by killyb at 9:50 AM on May 10, 2006

I don't know of other media players that will take advantage of hd content

How so? Try playing the video in a good, light player like Zoom Player.
posted by rxrfrx at 9:57 AM on May 10, 2006

HD video works well for me in QuickTime, but not in MediaPlayer classic. It could be the player, the codecs, or the phases of the moon.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:59 AM on May 10, 2006

This is the video I'm trying to play, although I have had problems with all other HD files I've tried before. Media Player Classic runs about the same as WMP, and Divx Player runs a little better, but both still have the high CPU usage. I'm running it off the only hard drive in my machine, and everything else reads 0 for CPU usage.
posted by Orange Goblin at 10:00 AM on May 10, 2006

Oh and when I've tried to play HD stuff in Quicktime (like trailers off the Apple website) I've had the same problem.
posted by Orange Goblin at 10:02 AM on May 10, 2006

Video drivers can make a huge difference in the quality of playback of HD video. Are you using recent WHQL drivers from NVIDIA? If not, they could make a huge difference, especially since I think they'll offload some of the decoding to the GPU when used with WMP/Directshow.
posted by Good Brain at 10:13 AM on May 10, 2006

The most likely answer is that your vidcard is forced to downsample the video on the fly, given that 720p is usually 1280 on the horizontal. Can you increase your screen resolution to cover this?
posted by jimmythefish at 10:49 AM on May 10, 2006

I tried increasing the resolution, and it still ran just as bad. That's not really a viable solution anyway, as my monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x960.
posted by Orange Goblin at 11:12 AM on May 10, 2006

Did you check your driver version?
posted by Good Brain at 11:30 AM on May 10, 2006

Yeah, I upgraded to the most recent, and it had no effect.
posted by Orange Goblin at 12:03 PM on May 10, 2006

i finally finished downloading the video(didn't register), did the same thing on my end, audio just fine, video useless. I'm running a p 2.8 with a gig of ram, i've updated the drives for video, still nothing....good luck
posted by killyb at 12:03 PM on May 10, 2006

Choices as I see them, in this order:

* Ensure your video acceleration is turned on (you can degrade it via advanced settings under Windows)
* Update video drivers (always a good move)
* Try higher/lower resolution and color bit-depths combinations.
* Defrag the hard drive the video is sitting on. Fragmented files can cause slowdown issues of all kinds.
* Convert the file with Gourdian Knot to something with a lower resolution/bitrate.
posted by catkins at 1:13 PM on May 10, 2006

Has anyone actually downloaded and watched this video without stuttering?

Maybe it is the file.

I was too impatient to deal with the hoops of getting it.
posted by mzurer at 1:23 PM on May 10, 2006

The problem is that this file is an extremely high bitrate - 1280x720 at 60fps. That's just a lot of data to decode without some hardware acceleration. It's 117MB for 80 seconds of video.

I was able to play back the file with some minor skipping. My system is a relatively old CPU though (Athlon 2800/Nvidia 5700) so I imagine on a more modern system it would be a lot better. I wasn't able to watch fullscreen, I had to resize the window. And I had to switch to the overlay mixer, as VMR7/9 were pretty much useless.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:26 PM on May 10, 2006

My box is about the same specs as the original poster's, and I also get quite a bit of stuttering with the video, and the CPU stays at 100%.

My vote is for very poor video compression (or lack thereof). Looking at the properties, I see:

Audio: Windows Media Audio 48000Hz 6ch 384Kbps [Raw Audio 0]
Video: WVC1 1280x720 59.94fps 15000Kbps [Raw Video 1]

15 megabits per second? They didn't even try. It doesn't appear to be compressed much at all.
posted by neckro23 at 8:50 PM on May 10, 2006

Uh, no. 15Mbit/s is quite reasonable compression for 1280x720 @60fps. The raw bitrate if it were not compressed would be around one hundred times that (1,327 Mbit/s), so this is quite compressed. The VC1 standard goes much higher than 15 Mbit/s in fact: VC1 Profiles.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:07 PM on May 10, 2006