www.makemkv.com

For the most part, when playing a 7 min. short film/cartoon, I experience little to no difficulties. But if, for example, I try to playback "A Charlie Brown Christmas" ripped from the 1080p Blu-Ray disc (or most any 1080p files) with VLC Media Player on my laptop, the video playback often freezes or breaks up in parts. I know that this isn't inherent to the .mkv file itself because if I pause and go back to the specific timecodes where visible glitches were apparent, they are not consistently there. Sometimes video will freeze/pause (while audio continues) or the media player screen goes black for a duration and I'll rewind to the specific timecode and the video will appear - albeit playback is usually slow and jumpy. Sometimes it will get heavily pixelated and blocky, the image will get broken up and I'll rewind and pause and there appears to be no problem; pixelization and video break-up seems to occur the most frequently. The main issue however, is that there *is* consistently a problem with playback of 1080p .mkv files with the VLC Media Player. Now to be clear, my laptop is a Dell Studio 17 and shipped with PowerDVD (fully Blu-Ray compatible!) so I wonder if it's just the .mkv format itself with 1080p, the media player which is not consistent or reliable, or something else - perhaps my laptop's space and usage capacity; am I pushing it to the limit? I try to close all programs and even browser windows prior to playback. Does anyone have any suggestions? Also is there a preferred media player for Windows (I'm running Vista) which works especially well with high-def .mkv playback? I'd really like to get this sorted!

Thanks so much!

How warm/hot is your laptop getting while playing the files?

SC

@OliverTwist: There are several things to talk about here.

The kind of playback issues you are describing sound like they are specific to your PCs performance and NOT software related as such.

There are several potential reasons for your issues and several things you can do to prove what's causing the issue and / or fix the problem.

1. Windows Vista - It really needs to go. It's a resource pig and both Windows 7 and Windows 8 will allow your machine to
run far better and faster and will utilise available resources far more efficiently.

Windows 8 is a good option contrary to popular opinion but make sure you install a good free Start Button so that it runs
more or less like Windows 7 in desktop mode and you can avoid that stupid Tiled Menu system as much as possible.

Get a good free Start button here: http://www.ninite.com


2. Your video card / chipset drivers : You need to make absolutely sure that you have the very latest video drivers
installed because that can cause a lot of trouble.

3. Codecs: It's possible that you have codec issues although I find it unlikely because you are using VLC and that generally
plays everything.

Just in case though, you should install KLite Codec pack, which will also install Media Player Classic (MPC) for you.

Then try to play the same movies in MPC and see what happens.

Get KLite from: http://www.ninite.com

4. Your PC may just be too underpowered to handle the media you are trying to play. You say it's 1080p so maybe your
machine simply can't handle the bitrate of that media.

Or the video chipset can't handle it, to be specific.

In my opinion, the first thing that needs to happen is that Vista MUST go. It is just too much of a resource hog and you cannot get optimal performance out of a PC running VISTA. It just makes no sense to still be running VISTA when both Windows 7 and 8 are now available and both are FAR more performant.