Movie is lagging

[freicher]

Hi!

I just purchased w520 laptop with i7-2720M, 1000M and 1600x900 screen. Before the purchase I tought that all videos and majority of games would be a piece of cake, but I run into trouble with 720p and 1080p movies. What is the bottleneck?


One of the video files was the following:
Bluray movie
Video Format: x264
Video Bitrate: 5749 kbit/s
Video Resolution: 1280x720


In addition, could someone briefly explain what would be the best way to use the battary so it would last as long as possible. Should I remove it, if I use AC quite constantly?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Are you up-to-date on all of your drivers and software?

As for the battery, use Power Manager in Advanced mode to set a charging threshold of 80% --> 90% for the battery. This allows you to keep the battery in the machine as a battery backup for temporary power outages without overcharging the battery. Also avoid hot temperatures, draining the battery below 10%, and high power draws on the battery (i.e. gaming on battery, high CPU loads; I recommend lowering performance on battery as much as tolerable to prevent this).

[freicher]

I almost figured it out. I was playing videos from an external hard drive and that must have been the problem. Now I bought a new monitor, Dell U2311H (23", 16:9, 1920 x 1080, 8ms, IPS), and again 720p stuff isn't running well.

Everything should be up to date.

[davidhbrown]

Didn't the W520 come with some sort of Corel video player? Yeah... there's a Corel folder hiding in my user directory with WinDVD10 inside it. I think I tried it once and nuked it because of playback issues. (WinDVD seemed okay back on my Dell.; that was about 7 years ago though.) Windows Media Player does fine for me with DVDs and even BD (had to buy drive and license for that).

Anyway, trying a different player would be something to consider if your problems recur.

[freicher]

I'm using VLC and Arcsoft Media Theatre and the problem is not constant, but reappeares occasionally. Could the problem be in not enough RAM (4gb)?

[davidhbrown]

I suppose it's possible, but the Nero Kwik Media player I have -- which does not live up to its name, by the way... takes about 20 seconds to start up -- uses only about 300MB to play back a DVD (Windows Media Player is about the same) and 600MB to play back a BD disc.

However, I do notice that with Outlook 2010, Firefox 6, and Windows Media Player open, my total "In Use" is 4593MB or so. That includes Apache and MySQL services, Genie Timeline (automatic backup), Skype, etc. So I'd guess that you'll want to be careful about shutting down things you aren't using.

[billp117]

Cyberlink PowerDVD 10.0 works fine for me. It is worth the purchase...got mine on eBay.

[TuuS]

I suggest you install either K-Lite codec pack, or CCCP. Either codec pack contains Media Player Classic and all the codecs you need to play any modern video encoding. It's also all free and contains no bloatware.

I definitely wouldn't pay for any video player, there are free ones (such as this option) that work better and don't hog resources. After all, you want a player to do one thing, which is play a video, you don't need to pay money to get one that has a pretty gui and makes your playback unstable.

K-Lite codec pack (full) http://www.free-codecs.com/download_sof ... 6581&s=775

I will warn you do NOT change default install options unless you are sure of what your doing. Codec packs always contain more then one option that does the same thing and enabling both will cause conflicts. Default settings should play anything you throw at it.

I do recommend you decline the free search/toolbar option at the end of install though, it's not malicious, but I consider it bloatware.

Combined Community Codec Pack http://www.free-codecs.com/download_sof ... 6040&s=572

Install either, do NOT install both!

[billp117]

I think the original question was regarding Bluray. I did not know that K-lite would play Bluray.