Unable to play HD videos from camcorder on laptop.

elchanco

Hi,

I have a year’s supply of videos stored on a Toshiba Camileo S20 Full HD 1080p camera. When I transfer the files to my PC, the video lags and stutters.

I tried watching the videos on my media drive but the same problem occurs.

Any help much appreciated.

fionny

What format are they in?

Meesared

What spec is your laptop?

Specifically CPU, RAM and Graphics

elchanco

Format is in avi.

My notebook is the Dell Inspiron Mini 10V Netbook Computer (Intel Atom N270, 160GB HDD, 1GB).

I have also got an old dell inspiron laptop which also wont play the files!

fionny

I would try download the codec pack from this site as a first step:

http://shark007.net/

Download and install and see if it will play any better. Might also be worth installing VLC player as it tends to work better then Windows Media Player (I assume you are using this)

VLC Player available @ www.videolan.org

burrentech

Another great Media Player called Green Force Player, or GFP is available from http://gfp.rrsoftware.de/

It also allows you to set passwords on your media files.

Meesared

elchanco wrote: »

Format is in avi.

My notebook is the Dell Inspiron Mini 10V Netbook Computer (Intel Atom N270, 160GB HDD, 1GB).

I have also got an old dell inspiron laptop which also wont play the files!

nope nothing is gonna make any difference an Atom cpu cant even play 720p videos smoothly, cant comment on the older laptop though, depends on its spec also

elchanco

Im using vlc at the moment..

What about my media drive, this wont play the video clips also?

Meesared

What media drive is it?

fionny

Meesared wrote: »

nope nothing is gonna make any difference an Atom cpu cant even play 720p videos smoothly, cant comment on the older laptop though, depends on its spec also

I think your wrong there buddy:
http://gadgets.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Atom-N270-Can-Do-1080p-Full-HD-Without-NVIDIA-039-s-ION-1791-01.html

Admittedly it is a push for it.

Meesared

requires extra hardware my point still stands

ScumLord

elchanco wrote: »

Format is in avi.

AVI is a broad term, there are many types of AVI file. I think Divx is a type of AVI format.

You should download a codec pack first of all so that you can play all the video types available, it's probable your camcorder compressed the video into some weird AVI format to get more out of the space available.

Overall it may not be possible to get a smooth playback on an underpowered laptop.

I wouldn't have thought that was true as my phone can play back HD divx content but the thing you have to remember is that AVI is a compressed format, the reason it's slow to play on slower computers is because the video has to be uncompressed on the fly.

elchanco

Ok,

The media drive I tryed to watch the files on was a Cyclone Primus 2TB Media Player. Ive ordered a Iomega ScreenPlay DX so maybe this will play the files.

Is there a way of coverting the files to another format that will play on my laptop/media drive.

Damn HD camera is doing my head in now...

xsiborg

i have an HD camcorder myself, and the default format for these file types is not AVI, but AVCHD, or MTS, M2TS. the problem is indeed your hardware, no matter what codec or software you use, it will still stutter because your graphics card can't handle processing the video quality.

all is not lost though, as you can still import these files, just browse to the folder in windows explorer, your camera storage device will probably show up as an external drive in My Computer, and off the top of my head i think the files are stored in a folder called "STREAM", (may be called something else on your camcorder).

just copy over the files, dont try to play them yet. open Windows Live Movie Maker, then import the file into the work area, it'll take a while to process the file (this is where the conversion is being done to convert the file into a lower quality format that WLMM can work with (to give you some idea- ten minutes of video takes approx half an hour to convert). then you can save the file as a WMV video, or whichever format you choose really, depending on quality you want.

i did this as a proof of concept on an Advent 4211c netbook with an Atom 270 processor with 2gb RAM. it takes a while, but its not impossible!

my suggestion- if you are actually serious about editing your videos, i'd suggest you buy a more modern laptop capable of handling HD streams...

ScumLord

The media isn't "playing" on the hard drive so I don't think it'll make any difference. The media is coming off the hard drive as common data and then being uncompressed on the laptop to play as video.

You can convert the files, I haven't used a simple converter but there's no reason why you can't convert them.

Can you play HD content on youtube? If you can you can convert your files to H.264.