General Question

AR57's avatar

High Quality video plays badly?

Asked by AR57 (7 points ) January 23rd, 2013

I got a Samsung N150P laptop with 1Gb ram and Windows-XP (SP3). Recently all “High Quality” videos (normally around 1.3Gb of file size) are unbearable. On VLC (2.0.5) they are choppy, semi pixlated and shows/freeze in steps of ¼ of seconds. On Potplayer (1.5.32) the sound and video synchronization flow during the movie to up to 3–4 seconds difference. I changed the PC advance performance settings to be geared towards Performance (and not Looks) but with no change. I tried to restart the PC and only play the video (as only application I run) with no better result.
Could anybody please advice of the reason for this?
Thank you very much.

Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0

7 Answers

Staalesen's avatar

Well, to be honest, the N150P is not exactly a powerhouse from what I could see.
Could it be that the video is encoded in a format that demands so much of your computer that it cant handle it ?

Also.. Have you updated your codecs ? Old codecs often result in bad performance as well.

AR57's avatar

Thank you for your reply. I just downloaded and installed the latest Codec Pack. No joy. Even the “Media Player Classic -HC” they included with it shows with big synchronisation problems.
Maybe, as you said, I must accept that I need to keep up with technology. Maybe I’ll start with putting 2Gb inside instead of the 1Gb. I’ll report here of updates when I do.
Thank you.

Response moderated (Spam)
jerv's avatar

Memory doesn’t matter if your GPU sucks. Most laptops have crappy GPUs.

Staalesen's avatar

I took some time to read about this computer, and it seems like it had problems playing back HD-qality movies from the get go..

If you dont want to buy a new machine, you should stick with non-hd content.. at that screen size there is not much to be gained by HD either…

jerv's avatar

@Staalesen Very true. Like most netbooks, the N150P has a 1024×600 screen. HD is either 720p or 1080p, so it cannot display them in full anyways, which meant hat in addition to straining to deal with all of the info from an HD video, it also has to strain to rescale it downward to a lower resolution.

To put things in perspective, I looked up the GPU benchmarks on Passmark to see exactly how low-powered it is so that I could show you why you are having issues.

My gaming PC has an add-on GTX 465 video card that scores 2,892; it’s a mid-range gaming GPU, and far more than most non-gamers would ever need. It runs games silky smooth, and doesn’t even notice HD videos.

Without that card, my system (an Intel Core i3–530) would have a score of 350, which would still be enough to do 1080HD, but not much more; not enough for any 3D game put out in the last few years.

My Laptop has an Intel GMA 4500M that scores 127, and it has mild issues with HD at times. 3D gaming is right out.

Your netbook’s Intel GMA 3150 has a score of 65; about half of what a system that occasionally struggles with HD has.

The CPU is similarly underpowered; the price one pays for low price and long battery life.

If the numbers confuse you, compare a Ferrari to a Ford F-150, a Yugo, and a Razer scooter, and you have a rough idea of how they stack up.

AR57's avatar

Just to conclude this thread, all the above replies, I received, were 100% correct. It seem that an HD video is beyond the capabilities of my machine, CPU and GPU wise. I have upgraded the storage to 2Gb but the fault remained. I took the same video file to a powerful machine (Dell Studio 1555 4Gb Win7) and it run very nicely.
Thank you very much for the help you provided.

Answer this question




to answer.


Your answer will be saved while you login or join.

Have a question? Ask Fluther!

What do you know more about?
Knowledge Networking @ Fluther