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Choppy DVD playback on Dell Inspiron 8200

P

PCDumbass

Senior member
Hi there,

Playing DVD's on my laptop is not something I do very often, but this past week I had to do some travelling and had the chance to give it a shot.

I was really not impressed with the choppy-ness that my laptop delivered while playing the DVD through VLC media player. I have a Dell Inspiron 8200, P4 1.7GHz Mobile, 768MB or RAM and it has a 64MB ATI Radeon video card from the factory.

While watching Star Wars and having NO other applications running, I could only watch a video screen about 1.5" x 2.5" in size without any major chop. Any bigger than that and the thing just jumped all over the place, very poor.

Are there some settings I can play with to make it run better? There must be since I can run the same DVD on my desktop PC (1.2GHz Duron, 16MB AGP Video card, 1GB Ram) using WinDVD4 @ fullscreen (17" monitor, similar resolution settings) and it runs fine.

Is my media player the culprit? Is the missing 256MB of RAM (compared to my desktop) really hurting me that bad? My video card is 4x faster on my laptop!

Help?!?!?

-Rob
robpilgrim@gmail.com
 
Is hardware acceleration or similar feature unchecked in the software. This would make a huge difference in performance. Is your laptop in a power save mode because the batteries are running low, thus compensating in CPU cycles resulting in choppy performance. Other than that try running msconfig to see what is running in the background on that system and uncheck unnecessary items.
 
Originally posted by: starky75
Is hardware acceleration or similar feature unchecked in the software. This would make a huge difference in performance. Is your laptop in a power save mode because the batteries are running low, thus compensating in CPU cycles resulting in choppy performance. Other than that try running msconfig to see what is running in the background on that system and uncheck unnecessary items.
Click to expand...

I did already make sure I was on the "Always On" power management profile as I often switch from that to "Max Battery" when travelling.

In order for me to enable hardware acceleration, what would I need to do? Go into the video card's control panel, or ... ? I'm running Windows XP.

Thanks for the help thus far.

-Rob
 
I just managed to find the tab under Properties>Settings>Advanced>Troubleshoot on my work PC (the one I'm posting from), I will check this at home during lunch hour.

 
Hardware acceleration was set at max from the start... Grrrr.

I ran the ATI Radeon utility and set everything to maximum "Peformance" as opposed to "Quality", but still no difference.

I had a no-name brand, Celeron 2.0GHz laptop before this one with 256MB of RAM and a 16MB video card and it would play DVD's through WinDVD4 like my TV does - perfectly/

Any other ideas? Is there somethign obvious that I'm missing?

 
Funny, I have almost your identical laptop but with the nVidia card (Getting an ATI) and playback in WinDVD 2000 is flawless. I'd try installing WinDVD on your laptop and go from there. I have installed Cyberlink PowerDVD once and the playback was awful. Some of these apps just suck on laptops.
 
Well now, what's the chances I'd find a fellow with the same setup, awesome. I was hoping that it was just a software issue since my hardware does seem to be more than adequate to run a simple DVD.

I'll try to grab a copy of WinDVD 2000 somewhere and try it, thanks for the tip.
 
Yes, I was going to state that I played back DVD's on my Inspiron 8100 (P3 1.06Ghz, 512MB RAM, 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 mobility) and playback was flawless...so my first guess would have been software for playback wasn't doing its job.
 
Thats strange - I know that millions of ppl have different experiences:

I am a VLC disciple and thought i should spread the good word.
Problem is, when installed onto my lappy, it tends not to play very well, if at all. Very disappointed. Dl'd a whole bunch of codecs, Gspot says everything is fine, but VLC is just not happy on a little computer.

ah well. Life goes on.
 
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