AMD Athlon XP 4200 dual core - Full HD videos stuttering

[Toxidious]

Hi.

Have an old computer that had an AMD Athlon XP 3500, I upgraded that old one with an slightly newer one - a AMD Athlon XP 4200 Dual core. I was hoping to be able to play full HD videos directly without stuttering.

The video files is MTS files from a regular handheld camera. I have put the video files on first partition on a 250 Gb hardrive - so the problem is not likely to be caused by a bad disk (I've tried with other hdd in same computer, no difference).

I did some benchmark with 7-zip. It turns out that the performance is pretty much the same (variance is negligible) when running old CPU compared when running on the Athlon 4200 - forced to computate using a single core.

After using e.g. Handbrake to convert the videos to 1600x900 (h264, sound quality not changed) - the computer have no issues regarding to stuttering playback.
My theory is that the CPU simply does not have enough capacity to play full-hd videos.

Therefore my question - How can I (if possible) tweak VLC so that it uses less resources (cpu) in order to play video files on that computer?


Thanks in advance

[Lotesdelere]

On Vista or higher you can use DXVA2 hardware acceleration.
Otherwise there is not much you can do.

[Toxidious]

Yea - it's an old XP computer (not connected to internet, so security is not a big issue).

Also the graphic card is from around 2005, so I doubt DXVA2 will ever work on that computer.

I'm not using deinterlacking either.