[Mr Lazy]

I am very close to purchasing a HF100 and I've downloaded some of the sample clips on Vimeo etc.

I have downloaded the Oxygen AVCHD player and the latest DirectX stuff from MS.

When I play the (only) .MTS file I've downloaded the playback is somewhat jumpy/jerky.

When I play back the WMV (-HD I guess?) files in WMP they play smoothly but then they are only 1280x720 and the highest bitrate is 15Mbps.

Do you think this means my PC is not up to the job of AVCHD playback?

OS: Vista Home Premium
CPU: AMD Turion64 x 2 TL-56 (1.8Ghz)
RAM: 1GB
Graphics are internal (laptop)

Would upgrading to 2GB help or is it the graphics chip that is letting the side down? (I can provide WEI scores if it helps, the graphics side is low at 3.0 the rest are fairly decent).

p.s. started to download the trial version of PowerDVD but it said it was going to take over an hour so maybe I'll leave that overnight.

[s3marc]

try nero 8 (nero vision) - there is a trial download available. This seems to need less grunt from the pc.

[Mr Lazy]

Thanks s3marc

I have now tried Nero Showtime 4 (as part of Nero 8 trial) and PowerDVD 8 free trial.

PowerDVD sort-of plays the file - I can hear audio and the progress meter moves but it does not play the video (shows a visualizer thingy). The website really isn't clear, but I think that only the Ultra version supports AVCHD (the trial is just the vanilla version).

Nero just crashes. I downloaded an .m2t file and that played ok in Nero though a little jerky.

Does this mean my PC is not up to the job? Is it worth upgrading the RAM? Is there anything else I can try? Help I don't want to get a HF100 and find I can't watch the HD video!

[Mr Lazy]

Well Nero now seems to be playing the .mts files - though still very jerky - but at the same time it pops up a window saying "Missing features: AVC/H.264 Decoding...this feature is only available with the full Nero 8 version..."

What's the point of these trials if you can't test ALL the features? How are you meant to know which one will playback AVCHD from your camcorder unless you try them?

Updated GOMplayer to latest version (and disabled internal filter) and found that played the video the smoothest of all but still some jerkiness, so I guess my hardware is not quite up to the job

[rhubarbe]

I think that your PC is borderline.

When AVCHD plays at a reduced frame rate it looks horrid, and when it plays at full frame rate it can look beautiful.

Could you put your SDHC card into somebody else's PC just to do the tests?

[Mr Lazy]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

I think that your PC is borderline.

Hi rhu, I think you're right. Being a laptop, it's the graphics that let it down, even though it's only a year old. I'll upgrade the RAM to 2GB anyway as it's only 28 quid. It may or may not make a diff.

When AVCHD plays at a reduced frame rate it looks horrid, and when it plays at full frame rate it can look beautiful.

Yes even the samples I've seen that have been downconverted to 720 (to fit on Vimeo) look fantastic, I love the level of detail you get.

Could you put your SDHC card into somebody else's PC just to do the tests?

Haven't got the HF100 yet, but when I do I could try putting the card in the old man's Mac, though that's at least 2 years old so may struggle also, but he's thinking about getting one of those iMac thingies or whatever it is.

All this has got me thinking (further) about playback. I can see me storing the footage (unedited) on hard disk and then when I want to play something back in HD on the HDTV I copy it back to a spare SDHC card and playback via the camcorder. In the future I'd love to be able to afford a PS3 but can't right now. I must look into a Popcornhour (or similar) as that may be a good stop gap but I think networking it will be tricky in our house, unless there are other ways of getting video onto it.

[Smurkenstein]

Is there any chance to upgrade the onboard graphics by sticking in an 8xxx series geforce? I know that asus laptops will take these cards, and my old tosh had the option of adding in an external card and inactivating the onboard.

The reason I ask is that recent geforce cards have hardware decoding of HD built in. So you could pair such a card with power DVD that has "purevideo" support, and in theory, you might get a result....

[Mr Lazy]

Originally Posted by Smurkenstein

Is there any chance to upgrade the onboard graphics by sticking in an 8xxx series geforce? I know that asus laptops will take these cards, and my old tosh had the option of adding in an external card and inactivating the onboard.

Thanks Smurk, that's an interesting idea that I'll investigate, but TBH as it's a lower-end Dell I doubt it.

I tried Corel WinDVD 9 last night and quite a big difference. It played the 1440x1080 video totally smoothly. The 1920x1080 video was still a bit jerky but better than with the other programs.

I guess with this hardware I won't be able to do any editing for a while