cant play HD video

hello everyone, and a precautionary sorry if this is in the wrong thread!

ok, so as the title suggests, i have problems playing HD video (only 720p)... my setup is this:

athlon xp 1800+, overclocked to a 2400+
1.25 gb pc3200 RAM
radeon x1600 pro graphics card

what seems to happen is that at the start, the video is extremely choppy. a few moments in, it smothes out, but then becomes choppy again. i have onboard audio (avance ac'97), could this be the problem? or maybe its my cpu, in which case this isnt a big problem, since my friend is giving me his 3000+ soon. im using wmp11, do i need a separate h.642 decoder? are there any free ones?

thanks in advance.

Apple recommends 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 for 720p, & 3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium D for 1080p. I lost my Athlon XP to P4 decoder ring, but I think that an overclocked Athlon XP 1800 may not cut it.

dung

Do you know if the video is mpeg2 or h264?

If it is mpeg2 (such as from atsc/ota antenna), your athlon xp should do the job as long as your mpeg2 decoder has hardware acceleration turned on. I recommend the nvidia purevideo decoders. I play HD video on my XP2500 all the time with no problems. Although if you are using Vista then you are probably not going to get it to work, I have had horrible luck getting HD video play on Vista.

If you are trying to play h264 I think you are out of luck.

My configuration is similar, XP2600+, Radeon9700pro, 1.5GB ram, WinXP, and I have the same problem, but only with some videos. For example, all HD videos (WM9, 720x1280) from gametrailers.com play nicely with ~50% CPU load, but sometimes I stumble on a video that doesn't play well, video gets choppy and starts lagging compared to the sound, this was happening with Hellgate: London trailer in wmv. The stange thing was that the CPU was loaded at about 20%, so maybe the GPU was doing the coding, but was unable to do it fast enough. As for h264, 720x540 plays with some 50% CPU load, so 720x1080 might get to 100%..

Its your processor, you have an underpowered system to be running that type of video playback, i have an xp 1800 system and I tried hd with no success.