HD video plays slow...help

Its your hardware, any integrated video on the market will perform better than your 6600GT in terms of video, and your CPU probably isnt picking up either.

Your specs are simply too low to play HD videos, you still have a P4 right?

yup i have a p4 3.0 HT. but i dont understand even though the integrated memory is just at a max of 98 mb and the dedicated one at 256 why would the later give a lag....and trust me HD vids play SMOOTH with the integrated graphics...

actually i kinda figured the problem out. coz when i play the 1080 files on my ide hard disk it plays very very fine (and same when playing from a pendrive)... but when i play with the sata thats when it lags...now this happens on both the sata hard disk i have and both are brand new...further the sata wont give a lag when on the integrated card...

6600GT should be faster than intergrated by quite a bit. When you say SATA do you mean an internal drive on SATA ports or do you mean external USB drives? It's a bit confusing why you say the onboard video plays video smoother.

Up your RAM to at least 1 gig also, 512 is too low to run video well. 2 gig would be ideal.

Even-though the 6600GT is faster power wise, its not until after the 8600GT that GPUs supported hardware acceleration (Purevideo HD/UVD2) of HD videos, and with an slow CPU like the P4, software decoding is bound to be laggy.

So say with an integrated 8200/HD3200, the GPU might be much slower than your 6600GT, but it is splitting the effort required by the CPU to decode HD, while your 6600GT might be alot more powerful(it isnt really) it isnt helping at all and the P4 is forced to do all the work.

firstly thank you all for sharing your solutions...and yes sir your theory may be right but like i said why would it play on a basic pendrive or even the ide hard disk..in fact i am playing a 1080p file right now without a bit of lag while i type and no ram will not solve my purpose coz i already have 250mb free memory(i.e even after playing high end vids) ...and by sata i ment internal hard disk....

IDE?
you have 2 HDDs?

in fact 3.... 1 ide and 2 sata...wats worse is tht dspite the ide being 6yrs old and having a cache of 2mb plays the vids without a prob...but the sata (brand new bought last week) are causing the lag when i play the video from them....

Whats the model of the SATA?
Try playing the same clip on the different drives to rule out its a bad drive.

i did that i have a seagate sata and a samsung sata...the seagate is giving more probs than the samsung(the led is almost always on) while the samsung though not doing as well as the ide but ya gives less lag and less led blinking(not to say it does not at all)...wats confusing me is why would it run so well on the ide which is prob even fragmented into a mil pieces...

Seagate 7200.11?
Try updating the firmware.

It could also be your broad having a bad/slow SATA controller if both SATA drives isnt at least on par with the IDE one.

i did the latest firmware upgradation and its a 7200.12.... btw a poor sata controller was my guess too but i was proved wrong when it played smooth on the integrated graphics...okay now even if we assume the sata ports dont get along with my agp graphics slot (oh yes i have a agp not a pcie...my comps old) then should i buy a external port which is in the market...would that work....

same problem here , i have 2 sata wd internal drives and on the both drives a 1080p or 720p video is a bit laggy but in my 4 year old ide wd the video plays way better and smoother . These were both tested on a 9600 gt .
sata drive specs
16 mb cache
500 gb
7200 rpm
caviar blue

ide
2 mb cache
160 gb
7200 rpm
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u know there is a saying that "old is gold" , well i guess thats true !!!