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  • OT – video playback on laptop
  • speaker2animals
    Full Member

    Hi anyone suggest any remedies, my limited knowledge of PCs hasn’t tunred anything up.

    The playback of any video on my Dell Inspiron 1525 is rubbish irrespective of source. So whether it’s streaming, downloaded or even from a DVD playback is like watching Norman Collier (thi…crophon…i…t workin.).

    I know I didn’t spec an all singing all dancing machine but a mid range “do anything”. I’m hoping that it’s a matter of doing some fiddling of settings somewhere in Control Panel, but I’m not really knowledgeable enough to go changing things at random.

    And please – no replies about should have bought a Mac/Sony or whatever, thanks.

    joemarshall
    Free Member

    Assuming the video and the sound are jumping, it’s probably because you’re running something else at the same time.

    That’s a jolly fast machine, something half the speed would happily play DVDs, let alone that.

    Press ctrl+shift+escape, and go to ‘processes’ on the window that pops up, and look on that list. Is there something that is showing 90 or more in the CPU column, other than ‘System Idle Process’.

    This sort of thing happens on dvds is the drive goes bust too, but if it’s happening on everything it probably isn’t the dvd drive.

    Have you run a virus check / spyware check recently?

    Is the web / loading programs slow?

    Joe

    spooky_b329
    Full Member

    I’ve got the same lappy, no problems here except when youtube is having a bad day. iPlayer, DVDs, Youtube/Vimeo all fine.

    Your laptop isn’t overheating is it? If you block the vents on the back left near the power lead it might start to throttle back the CPU…mine gets pretty hot if I’ve used the lappy on the duvet or the vents have been against my leg.

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    speaker2animals
    Full Member

    Thanks to you both. At moment do use my laptop on my lap and it does get hot. Saves having the heating on. Have wondered about deliterious effects on the machine. Desk coming soon.

    Some of the small inbedded vimeo/youtube vids run fine but not always the same from the actual autor site. I just assumed that was broadband speed and wi-fi signal varying. So I have downloaded vids and they run no better. Now I assume that as you’re downloading the data and not a stream of video, that playback would be fine but it’s not.

    I’ll try out what joe suggested.

    Cheers.

    Report back soon.

    househusband
    Free Member

    There’s a Firefox extension called Download Helper that will download video content and also convert to .avi files for playback at your leisure. Can be handy for video files that look good but are clunky to stream.

    retro83
    Free Member

    Are you up to date for video + sound drivers?

    bigrich
    Full Member

    VLC player is the one dor all forms of vid plaback, and its free!

Viewing 7 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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