Player Recommendation

[consultant]

I've been using VLC Media Player. My Win7 T7200 dual-core notebook with 2GB ram and 1000 mbit/ethernet is connected via gigabit switch to my Q8200 quad core Vista 64-bit machine with 6GB Ram and SATA 7200RPM HD. I'm very frustrated with MKV playback of Blu-Ray rips, even ones I've reduced the size with a high quality (cRF=18) reenecode. There is stuttering, freezing, and when I skip way ahead the audio gets out of sink.

Is there a more reliable/efficient media player? It works of course much better when I use VLC on the machine where the MKV is stored but sometimes I get stuttering on that machine too! My gut is telling me my notebook CPU combined with gigabit ethernet should be plenty fast to play 1080P MKV no problem. I'm hoping it is just that the VLC codec isn't that good.

[stax76]

You can try this for instance:

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net
http://haali.su/mkv
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net
http://shark007.net/win7codecs.html
http://www.codecguide.com/windows7_preferred_filter_tweaker.htm
http://blog.monogram.sk/janos/tools/monogram-graphstudio/

Blu-ray has 3 video codecs and countless audio codecs and for most codecs there are many different decoders that could possibly be used.

[leeperry]

KMPlayer 2.9.4.1435 (http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14938)

[saint-francis]

What's the video card on the lap top? You might be able to get your video card to decode the video entirely leaving your CPU very little work to do. Try MPC HC like Stax suggested. You might not need any of the other things he listed at all.

EDIT

Aside form Haali media splitter. You'll need that one.

[~Revolution~]

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack w/CoreAVC. Simply said. Extremely powerful. NOTHING beats it. ;)

PS: The more you manually tweak it, the better it gets (assuming you know what your doing) ;)

Good Luck :)

[edigee]

There should be no problem for your laptop to play in software mode H264 720p or 1080p videos.
Use MPC_HC or KMPlayer with CoreAVC as an external filter. Set CoreAVC as prefered decoder to be sure is always loaded.
DivX H264 is also a fast software decoder ,you can use that one too.
Other solutions(software) are:
-ffdshow H264 decoder or MT decoder(optimized for multiple core CPU)-that one would give you the best image quality but with a higher CPU usage.
-Microsoft H264 decoder that comes with WMP12 in W7.
If your videocard is able to decode H264 videos(Intel GM45-chipset, ATI HD 3xxx or 4xxx series ,NVIDIA 8xxx, 9xxx or GT series) than you can try use DXVA for playing videos.
http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/
http://nunnally.ahmygoddess.net/configuring-kmplayer-to-play-h-264-videos-using-microsofts-directx-video-acceleration-dxva-and-nvidias-compute-unified-device-architecture-cuda/

[tetsuo55]

Other solutions(software) are:
-ffdshow H264 decoder or MT decoder(optimized for multiple core CPU)-that one would give you the best image quality but with a higher CPU usage.
there should be no difference in image quality, can you provide any information on how the image quality differs?

[edigee]

Sorry ,between those two there is no difference! you're right.
Edit:
Completly forgot that one:
http://mirillis.com/splash.html