How to get a smooth playback for high definition videos?

Question

How to get the maximum number of frames processed in real time despite hardware limitations? In 720p I am getting less than 12 fps in VLC Media Player in a specific hardware, for a MKV encoded video.

Answer 1

Have a look at CoreAVC - http://corecodec.com/products/coreavc This is a one-off cheap cost (~10$) plug-in for some media players and claims to be the fastest playback.

Answer 2

Jeff Atwood has posted something about this

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001197.html

After a great deal of research, I found Media Player Classic Home Cinema. The big deal here is two things:

All codecs are "burned into" the Media Player Classic executable, so there's do dependency on whatever random codecs your PC happens to have installed (eg, ffdshow, cccp, Ivan's Krazy Elite Kodek Pak, etc).

It supports offloading video decoding duties to modern video cards. This is limited to recent Radeon HD models and nVidia 8 and 9 series. Fortunately, my HTPC motherboard includes an embedded Radeon HD 3200 -- and since I blew up my old one (it's a long story) the new version I just installed includes 128 megabytes of dedicated DDR3 video memory, too.

And then

But I want to play my movie files in Windows Vista Media Center, not a weird little standalone app. Here's the most awesome part of this post: you can!

As I discovered buried in an obscure forum post, here's how:

1. download the standalone MPC-HC filters.
2. Extract MPCVideoDec.ax and copy it into c:\windows\system32\
3. Open a command prompt, navigate to c:\windows\system32\, and run regsvr32 MPCVideoDec.ax

Be sure you don't have any other video codecs registered, as the MPC-HC filter can handle everything. Once you register this magical codec, Windows Media Player (and thus, Windows Media Center) will use hardware accelerated high definition video playback. It's amazing. How amazing? Those Planet Earth rips, which used to take 80-100% of a mainstream dual core CPU, barely take 40% when using the hardware accelerated MPC-HC filters.

Answer 3

You... can't! You could recode the video to a lower resolution (which would run fine - but not be in 720p anymore), but if your hardware can't cut it, your hardware can't cut it! VLC already does everything it can to get smooth video. A better solution would be to purchase a cheapish graphics card that can play the video back smoothly (Almost any dedicated card should do fine - my ATI X1300pro doesn't even struggle with 1080p footage)