T30 HD H264 Video file (MKV, AVI) Playback Issues

[capnmoench]

Hello all there on the forum. Firstly, I'd like to say I love this forum, being the owner of a T30, and my newly rebuilt music media "powerhouse", an old 240, which I could have not loaded an OS without the help of reading other posts on here.
My question is about playing H264 video files on my T30. I have upgraded it to no end. I am running XP professional. I've updated the bios, I replaced the CPU with a Pentium 4M 2.4 Ghz, installed 2Gb RAM, bought a docking station, installed a half size PCI graphics card (an ATI Radeon X1300) in the docking station, and tried several players (VLC, Media Player Classic Cinema) and the tweaked them as much as possible to try to play H264 video to no avail. Every time I try in Media player, the video is entirely too slow. Everything i try in VLC results in choppy playback. Both players result in 100% CPU usage. I was running the laptop in the docking station to my 40 inch 1280X768 VGA compatible LCD TV. I also upgraded to a 4 port USB 2.0 PCI card to prevent bottle-necking from my external drives. How can I get this working?
I can run h264 video just fine on my DELL 8400 Desktop. It only has a X300 Video card running 128MB compared to my T30's 256MB. Of course it is running 3.0 Ghz and is dual core and it has 2.5GB of RAM. I don't think that that is too much of a difference though. Maybe the lack of dual core and hyperthreading are my T30's downfall. I have tried everything. Is there a solution? Have I already answered my question? Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks, Capn'

[emeraldgirl08]

Hi. Is this problem confined to just the Matroska files???

Which codec pack are you using??? I have XP Pro w/ Klite Codec packs and my AV files run fine w/ Windows Media Player. I don't have any other player in my XP.

If you'll notice my sig I have pretty low specs so I'm not sure why your setup isn't working.

[RealBlackStuff]

http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/ ... page1.html

[capnmoench]

I have the K-lite codec pack, I have also removed the K-lite code pack and reverted back to the allin1 codec pack as I have had better luck with it. VLC needs no codec packs. I may be looking into purchasing core AVC for WMP Classic Home Cinema as suggested in the link from Realblackstuff.I just really hate having to pay for anything since I have the internet, and everyone knows everything on the internet is free. You just have to look hard enough. As of now I'm setting up a new post since I have a new problem. A real scary one. Please keep the ideas coming. I will be checking back. I moved my desktop out to the living room for videos and it takes up quite a bit of space compared to my docking station, my T30 and a couple of well hidden external hard drives. Thank you guys, and girls so much so far. Capn'

[doctor bloomquist]

Have you given smplayer a go? can't hurt.

[capnmoench]

So I just got back from vacation and pleased to see some responses/suggestions to my dilemmas. @ emeraldgirl08, I am having a problem with high definition video, not regular AV files. Anything over 3.5-4 GB for a 2 hour movie (bitrate to match) is just choppy.Are you able to play HD movies like these, or just 700-800 MB movies? I am out of the dock and am looking to bring some of my movies off of my external hard drive to the bedroom where my T30 now sits. I took it out of the dock because I didn't think about it until later, but I put it in that dock with the original 512MB RAM and couldn't play HD so I bought that video card. That didn't work so I went up to 1GB of RAM. Still no luck, I went up to 2GB of RAM. The docking station has a standard PCI slot for the video card. Not PCI-E which is way faster. I wonder if I might have a bottle-necking issue there. I reloaded the latest catalyst drivers for my integrated ATI 7500 video card. I will post back with results. Thanks, Capn