Trouble playing HD video in Windows Vista

T

Timdog

Gawd
Joined
Feb 7, 2003
Messages
661
System:
Intel C2D 3.0 ghz (stock for now)
2x2GB G.skill DDR2 800 RAM
DFI DK P35 Mobo
Geforce 9800GTX (stock with latest drivers)
WD 650GB SATA HD

So, when I first got this computer and installed Vista, everything was amazingly smooth. Games ran perfectly, I could watch HD video all day, and multitasking became very easy.

However, lately I've noticed a drastic slowdown in performance. Programs take much longer to load, I get stuttering in games, and HD video playback is very choppy (as if I was playing it on my older computer). I'm using a few youtube HD videos to test things since the problems are very visible there and allow me to quickly check if things have improved.

I've updated all drivers, uninstalled all unneccessary programs, ran ad-aware, ran a virus scan, defragged, checked my processes and none are hogging memory/CPU. I would prefer to not reformat though I will if things don't improve. One thing I have noticed lately is that my HD seems to be much more active than usual, it's almost always making noise. Also, the video plays back the same in IE, Firefox, and Opera.
 
HD should play fine on that computer, that's nearly identical to my last computer which played 1080p just fine. Have you installed all updates? Also give SP2 a try before reinstalling the OS.
 
Just saw that SP2 was released, installing right now. I doubt it will help, but worth a shot. This thing used to play 1080p and streaming HD videos fine but not anymore.

EDIT: SP2 had no effect.
 
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Maybe try disabling the AV and kill all processes in task manager that aren't OS related.
 
Did you change anything around the time the symptoms began? My next step would be to try older video drivers, and then maybe to a system restore [to a time when it worked as desired.]
 
Not really sure when these symptoms started occurring. I think I might try the system restore, maybe at a point about a month back to see if that affects it at all.
 
Timdog said:
One thing I have noticed lately is that my HD seems to be much more active than usual, it's almost always making noise. Also, the video plays back the same in IE, Firefox, and Opera.
Click to expand...

This is what is causing your playback issue. you need to find out what is causing the increased disk activity and how much CPU it is using, then fix the issue.

Drive might be on it's way out and the activity you are seeing is the drive doing massive amounts of error correction.
 
There seems to be a flash bug when switching videos. Instead of click HD on YouTube, append &fmt=22 to the URL and see if that problem goes away.
 
You can use the resource monitor (available through task manager) to see what programs are using the disk, which may lead to the culprit.
 
Looks like I've figured it out. Was a stupid reason: Veoh Web Player. I noticed that this was loading in my browser before I played any video. Uninstalled it and now HD video plays fine.
 
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