[goobergo]

Hey everyone. I am trying to set up a second tv with an older laptop that I had laying around the house to use with XMBC. I have encountered a problem as I can play videos just fine in XBMC but my HD videos are stuttering and not playing smoothly. These videos play fine in Windows Media Player but do not play well in XBMC. Any idea what may be going on and how I can attempt to repair it. I am using windows XP and the latest DHARMA release of XBMC. Thanks in advance.

[jhsrennie]

XBMC won't do hardware acceleration with Windows XP. That's probably why you're seeing the stuttering. While playing a video press O ("oh" not "zero") and on the last line of the info see what the CPU is. If it's close to 100% that's your problem.

JR

[natethomas]

What're the specs on your video card? "Old laptop" might suggest we're working with something that doesn't do DXVA1 or 2.

[goobergo]

Thanks for the replies. The specs on the PC are 3.2GHz intel Pentium 4, 512MB Ram, ATI Mobiliity Radeon 9000 IGP, 128MB DDR(shared) video memory. I'm not sure what specs you need from the video card, I searched for dxva 1 and 2 and couldn't find whether it supports it or not, I may not know what I'm looking for. I did find that it supports DirectX 8.1.

[natethomas]

Yeah, that GPU is way too old for DXVA. Your lappy, like mine, is entirely dependent on the CPU, and a 3.2Ghz P4 could very well be pushed pretty hard by 1080p content or high bitrate 720p content.

There could be two causes. Either the DX8.1 card is getting stopped up by some instruction XBMC is sending it, or, more likely, the Windows Media Player codec is slightly more optimized that our version of ffmpeg.

One of the devs may come along with more insight, but my general recommendation is going to be one you won't like. For HD, you may need a faster computer.