Thinkpads Forum

Does the T61's Intel GPU have hardware acceleration for 3GPP/mp4 codecs?

I have some tornado videos I shot on my phone (Galaxy S3), but they're unviewable on my T61 using VLC (they play flawlessly on the phone). More precisely, if I play them at 1/4 speed, they plan fine. If I try playing them at full speed, VLC chokes and splatters artifacts all over the place. I know it's not a data transfer rate problem, because the laptop has a SSD. I think it's just a matter of VLC trying to decode it through CPU brute force instead of taking advantage of any acceleration capabilities (limited though they might be) the T61 might have, but I'm hesitant to try buying commercial codecs because there are so many things that can go wrong with mp4 playback (failing to take full advantage of GPU acceleration, not quite implementing obscure parts of h.264, etc) I wanted to see whether any others have succeeded at it first.

For what it's worth, this specific video is identified by VLC as H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1), 1920x1080, 30.031376fps

VLC usually doesn't have a problem playing any HD video, but since it uses it's own internal codecs, if it won't play something, then it probably won't no matter what you do to your system. I suggest you install K-lite codec pack (full). Don't make any changes to default install settings and you won't have any problems with conflicts. It comes with "Media Player Classic", which will use your system codecs which have no problem playing 1080p video on my T61 systems, both Intel and nVidia. I like it better then vlc, but they are both very good players.

http://www.free-codecs.com/k_lite_codec ... wnload.htm

Some people prefer the CCCP (combined community codec pack) saying it's safer, but I've been using K-lite for about 8 years and never had a problem. Don't optional codecs and you'll be fine.


ps. both packs are free

Workaround might be to process the file with Handbrake and output it to something slightly more compatible?

Also, MediaInfo is really great for extracting video file details.

BK

Are you using Win7 or XP? In my experience HD video stutters on winXP but not on Win7 with the same hardware.
On Win7 I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema without any codec pack to play x264 MKV's.