h264 mkv stutters in playback

I am trying to watch a 1280x720 h264 .mkv file on my computer.

My computer is an Intel 2.4 GHz dual core (E4600) with 2 gigs RAM and an nVidia 8800GT video card, running Windows XP. It should be able to play anything I throw at it, but I get frequent stutters using vlc 0.8.6f and the latest Community Codec Pack. I have checked to see if vobsub is installed and it is not.

What can I do?

I still think it’s the CPU choking. H.264 is a very processor-intensive codec, so even with the latest processor, you never know. Here’s how to check. When you play the video, right click on your taskbar and choose task manager and look at the performance tab. Is CPU usage at 100%? Then look at the processes tab, and click at the CPU tab once or twice to sort processes by CPU usage. Is the VLC taking close to 100% of CPU usage? Or is there another background process competing with it and keeping it from making use of the processor? If the latter, you could kill the process if it is a non-essential program, or try increasing the priority of VLC (right click, and pick a higher priority).

You can try using your video card’s GPU to accelerate mkv playback instead of your CPU - playback should be 100% smooth and your cpu usage will lower:
[url]http://www.lowfps.com/play-1080p-x264-smoothly-using-gpu-acceleration[/url]

CPU is NOT Choking, the person who wrote that is tarded.

I have a celeron 430 that runs 720p MKVs fine with media player classic, but runs choppy with VLC.

BTW, the celeron 430 is using onboard nvidia video from my crap ECS mobo.

Again, 720p MKV with this setup is smooth as glass.

1080p runs smooth also, but only with the CPU overclocked about 50 percent (this surprisingly runs stable)

This computer only plays movies, so it doesnt get junked up with prno malware.

That version of VLC doesn’t use both cores. The new one may. Install the K-lite codec pack and make sure your ffdshow settings are set to 2 threads, or 4 if your dual core.

to play 1080p h.264 you need a dual core chip based on the core 2 duo line, this includes core 2 duo, pentium dual core, and celeron dual core.

pentium D and Celeron D will NOT be enough for the beefy 1080p MKV files out there.

Mike 1080p wrote: or 4 if your dual core.

i mean 4 of your quad core.