FullHD playback on a T42 possible?

[tomchr]

Hi,

I'm sitting here with my 1.8GHz T42 ThinkPad equipped with the 64MB Mobility Radeon 9600. This old laptop is able to playback 1280x720p videos without missing a beat. FullHD material (1980x1080) on the other hand stutters and goes out of sync.


I've read some old posts on the net that the Radeon 9600 supports DXVA and is capable of handling content such as H.264 AVC, thereby taking some of the workload off the CPU. However, I'm not sure on how to activate this feature.

I'm running Catalyst 9.3. I've tried CoreAVC 2.5, FFDShow in WMP11 and GOMPlayer. I've yet to install the Omega drivers for the ATI card.

Any experience on optimizing FullHD playback on a T42?

[pit1337]

For DXVA playback you need MPC-HC. Read about it here: http://imouto.my/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/
But don't be disappointed if it won't work - I doubt it will.

[dr_st]

The T42 is borderline for 1080p playback. With the right set of codecs / programs (maybe CoreAVC) you should be able to achieve smooth playback in a subset of 1080p files, but high bitrate videos will still be beyond the CPU's ability (and the GPU does nothing to help in this model - GPU-accelerated video playback was added in later generations).