Finally, Smooth HD Playback on Slower PCs and Netbooks

It’s the Achilles’ heel of older and slower machines—you try to watch HDTV on your PC or netbook, and it stutters. You try to play a Blu-ray disc, and it won’t start. You try to play a 720p or 1080p video file, and the image immediately starts to tear and lag. In this post, we offer tips on how you can get smooth playback for any video file—let’s breathe some new life into your old hardware.

So, what exactly is the problem?

HD video playback can put significant stress on older PCs, laptops, and slower netbooks. The amount of data flow that your typical HD video produces is usually between 6 and 25 Mbit/s; the average Blu-ray movie has a data rate of 30–40 Mbit/s (that’s about 4 MByte per second). Decoding this data is additional stress that many weaker systems can’t handle. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to improve HD playback on lower-end machines—even ones that are nearly five years old!

Our test rig and minimum requirements

For this blog post, we’ve dug up an older HP Tablet PC, the tx1120us. It sports a Turion 64 X2 processor with 1.8 GHz and is now more than four years old. Supported by two GBytes of RAM and a lower-end GeForce Go 6100, it was previously used for work purposes and playing DVDs. But, watching even a low-end HD video with the resolution 1280×720 (“720p“) leads to a regular stutter.

This rig represents the lower spectrum of hardware; playing back an HD file on a single core machine with only 512 MBytes of RAM simply wouldn’t work. So, almost all of the machines out there that are four to five years old will probably fail to play back high-definition content. Finally, let’s dig into our nine tips!

Tip 1: Get the very latest graphics driver (NVIDIA)

Yes, we’ve given this advice a couple of times before. It’s important to get the very latest drivers for your old rig. Chances are good that the desktop PC or notebook you’re using is still running its NVIDIA graphics driver and has never been updated. It’s likely that the driver has some performance bugs or just hasn’t been tuned for smooth video playback. On our HP tablet, I was shocked to find ForceWare 169.61, which is now two and a half years old.

Better jump to the new one and see if that helps! I always suggest downloading the very latest ForceWare from NVIDIA. It’s not uncommon that this might already fix a stuttering video. Unfortunately, depending on what older graphics card you have, you might be out of luck, as NVIDIA may have dropped support with their latest versions. No sweat! Go to the Laptopvideo2go Forums, and pick a driver that supports your NVIDIA chipset. In my case, using the GeForce Go 6100, I needed to go to the “19x Series GeForce Driver releases” and pick a driver that supports my card. Note, these drivers aren’t officially supported by NVIDIA – use at your own risk. Good advice: always scroll through the forum threads and read what other users have to say!

Step 1: Pick a driver series, such as the one pictured below.

Step 2: Select a driver and see if your NVIDIA graphics card is on the list.

Step 3: Click on “Download Driver”, and unzip the package.

Step 4 (for mobile users only): Download the INF file, and overwrite the one in the unzipped driver folder.

Step 5: Install the driver.

Tip 2: Get the very latest graphics driver (ATI)

If you’re running an ATI card or mobile chip, go to AMD’s graphics driver page to get the latest version for your system. It’s much easier to use when looking for the right driver for older graphics cards. On the company’s website, you’ll find instructions on how to identify your card, which drivers to pick, and how to uninstall older versions.

Tip 3: Make the jump to Windows 7

If your machine is capable of running Windows 7, then upgrade to Microsoft’s newest operating system. Starting with Vista, Microsoft introduced “glitch resilience”, and it improved massively in Windows 7. This little feature prioritizes your running video and audio to prevent background programs from interfering. Compared to XP, you will notice a lot less stuttering in movies—especially when they’re in HD, which puts additional stress on your system.

Tip 4: Get the latest codecs for your videos

To play back HD videos, Windows needs codecs. These little gizmos are responsible for bringing all sorts of video files, such as trailers, TV shows, movies, and home-made videos, to your screen. Over time, performance of codecs has improved massively, particularly in the HD department. They use less processor power and the capable graphics card for displaying video. Chances are good that you can achieve smooth playback just by jumping on the latest codecs for your videos.

For Windows XP and Vista users

Go with Cole2k’s latest “Codec Pack”. It includes the most recent versions of codecs for DVDs, Blu-ray discs, HD video files, and Flash video. Install the codec pack, restart your PC, and try playing an HD file.

For Windows 7 users

I haven’t seen a better codec pack for Windows 7 than Shark007. It immediately installs the best possible codecs and allows you to choose the ones you prefer (see Tip 5). Install the Windows 7 Codec Pack; 64-bit users should make sure that they install the required x64 components in addition to the 32-bit components.

In my example, getting the latest drivers and installing the latest codec pack wasn’t enough. The processor utilization went down from 100% to about 50–60%, but playback was still choppy. Apparently, the graphics chip still had problems handling the video. So, let’s move to Tip 5.

Tip 5: Get a lightweight media player (or media center) program

Windows Media Player in Windows 7 has been optimized in many ways, but it might not be the fastest player out there. We recommend Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC) for your HD needs on all Windows-based systems (XP, Vista, and 7); the latest release is lightning fast and especially designed for older machines.

Note: If you want maximum performance, try out a special MPC-HC mode that uses your graphics card Direct3D mode to play back all videos more smoothly. Go to “View/Options”, and select “Output”. Now click on “D3D fullscreen”; see if that works.

I also suggest trying out XBMC, which originally was designed to run on lower-end machines. Nowadays, it’s one of the most popular, third-party media center applications—and has kept its lightning-fast performance for modern video files.

Tip 6: Switch between different codecs (Windows 7 only)

Switching between HD codecs is always a good idea; in Windows 7 (and thanks to Shark007), it’s safe and reliable to do so. There are tools for XP and Vista, but in the past, I’ve had several issues and wouldn’t recommend it for now.

So, let’s try to switch between several codecs for HD video, which is in the h.264 format.

Step 1: Launch Shark007′s configuration utility via your Start menu.

Step 2: Switch to the “H264″ tab, and select “Use MPC-HC codec” under the “Use MPC-HC DXVA codec”. Make sure that Media Player Classic is installed (see Tip 5). Restart your machine—is the HD material running smoothly? If not, repeat these steps for the following codecs to see which works best for you:

• “Use FFDshow DXVA codec”
• “Use FFDshow’s codec”
• “Use CoreAVC” (see Tip 7 and make sure that CoreAVC is installed)

Tip 7: Try out CoreAVC codec

If there’s one codec in the world that has been optimized for lower-end machines (especially netbooks), it’s CoreAVC. The company, CoreCodec, somehow managed to squeeze every last bit of power out of your CPU/GPU; check out its Changelog for Version 2.0 to see what CoreCodec has done!

Note: CoreAVC isn’t free, but the US 9.95 will be well-invested if you have an older machine or a netbook—and (despite our tips) just can’t seem to get HD videos to play properly.

In my tests, it worked absolutely flawlessly—even a full HD 1080p video played without a hitch on our old rig!

Tip 8: Use PowerDVD 10

Another commercial solution that helped in my case was PowerDVD version 10 from Cyberlink. I would recommend downloading the trial version first and see how well it performs on your machine. My results were pretty good; the 1080p test file played smoothly. However, PowerDVD caused a lot of CPU stress (it was constantly at 100%) in order to keep the video smooth:

Tip 9: Optimize your PC for maximum performance

Last but not least—keep your Windows system running at peak efficiency! Follow all of our optimization tips, like defragmenting, firing up TuneUp Turbo Mode, and disabling as many startup applications as you possibly can. Go through our blog posts step-by-step and fine-tune Windows so that all of your resources can focus on the HD videos.

These tips will make your aging hardware be ready for and able to handle modern HD. If all of these steps failed, then your machine just isn’t powerful enough, and your desktop PC, laptop, or netbook will have to be replaced.

Got your HD working fine? Or do you have some additional tips you’d like to share? Share your story with our team!