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My 6 year old PC is fine for most things (3Gig Pentium 4, 2Gig ram) but I'm noticing jerky playback on some MTB films filmed in HD on a recent Alps trip - anyone know if its the graphics card or the PC in general thats causing this & if the graphics card, a suggestion of a faster replacement, I think its an AGP2 card.
1) Delete all your crap
2) Defrag [url] http://www.kessels.nl/JkDefrag/ [/url]
3) If its panasonic hd then it uses an annoying format, are you playing back with vlc? Always jerky with the panasonic format. Convert with [url= http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html ]super[/url]
playing back with vlc
I've found that VLC can stutter with HD, try:
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
This seems to work better for me.
http://www1.sapphiretech.com/us/products/products_overview.php?gpid=227
AGP card with hardware h.264/AVC playback, and DivX/MPEG encoding/decoding.
I used one of these in an old P4 PC, and made a fantastic media centre from it.
Crap cleared out & drive defragged (Western digital 320GB 133 IDE) only used for media storage, OS on a seperate 120GB Seagate HD, VLC & WMV both jerky, just wondering where the bottle neck is in my system, I don't want to buy a new graphics card only to find out that its not the issue.
Your system isn't powerful enough to decode HD media without some 'assistance' in the form of hardware.
Currently the CPU does the decoding - the above graphics card offloads this to the GPU, which is considerably more powerful than your CPU.
So whats the cheapest upgrade option for jerk free playback?
Do you know what type of slots you've got on the mobo? If by any chance you've got a spare PCI express slot, then you'll be able to get a cheap card from eBuyer or similar. If it's AGP or older PCI, then eBay will be your best bet.
http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pricelow&store=2&cat=48&limit=10&page=1
Here we go again, more tripe from the PC brigade
what gfx card do you have? look in device manager then display adapters
what gfx card do you have?
Radeon 9800XT
CharlieMungus - MemberHere we go again, more tripe from the PC brigade
Perhaps you could enlighten us to why its tripe?
I think I would be tempted to get a new system I'm not sure if it's your gfx card or cpu that's causing it to struggle with HD films.
I upgraded myself from a system a bit slower than yours which also struggled with HD.
Its not the cost but the hastle of changing the whole system - if I knew a graphics card would sort it, I'd buy one now.
A Radeon X850 XT would be twice as quick roughly.
Here's a list,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
If you put a shiny new graphics card in your machine you risk not really improving things and having a new graphics card that won't be suitable for an upgraded motherboard.
Personally, funds allowing, I'd either get a new machine off the shelf ( easy, possibly the cheapest way ), or go DIY and upgrade the cpu, motherboard, memory graphics card and hard drive ( harder, allows you to pick and choose what you want ).