The VideoLAN Forums

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

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

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.