H.264/AVC (mp4) Performance in Win7

Hi,

We have purchased a couple of Acer Timline 1810TZ laptops which have Intel Pentium SU4100/1.3 GHz ( Dual-Core ) processors, 3GB of RAM & W7-64bit. They are mainly for using whilst out and about but we went for them as they should have been more than capable of playing Divx (6) and/or H.264 encoded movies.

I have used Nero Recode to convert a couple of test movies to AVC Standard with a fairly low bitrate (1000kps) and although they play, the laptop seems to have an issue keeping the audio perfectly in sync with the video. The video does not jump at all.

I don't think it can be bitrate issues as I copied a complete DVD folder and played that via Media Centre without any problem and that had a bitrate 5x that of my Nero Digital file.

I did not really want to have to mess with 3rd party codecs but I am disappointed that Windows 7 does not appear to play these files perfectly, especially as the H.264/AVC format is not exactly new any more. Surely the processor is fast enough to decode the file? If not then there is some very dodgy advertising going on for some of these laptops!

Has anyone else got any views on the performance of these kind of video files with Win7? It makes no difference if I use WMP, WMC or Power DVD.

Andrew

Hi Anrew

I stopped using Nero years ago to do any video work as it was not giving me good results, and started using Handbrake and never have a problem when playing H264 files on my windows 7 laptop.

Give it a try, but if you want to rip from Dvd then you have to have VLC media player installed as well.

Hope that helps.

twdawson said:

Hi Andrew

I stopped using Nero years ago to do any video work as it was not giving me good results

That's very interesting. I have always found (on my XP & Vista machines) that Nero produced far better quality video, with better compression and much faster than DivX ever did. Coupled with the fact that Nero Recode is simple to use and reliable I thought that everything would be fine!

Interestingly I tried the same test movie with DivX6 (i.e. not H.264) and the same problems seem to arise so I am not sure what the issue is. If my 6 year old Archos media player can play DivX video at 2000kps without any issue, my shiny new laptop should be able to!