My daughter got an acer netbook last week and when she plays avi files through VLC player its choppy and unwatchable.it is the laptop or the software...she can play music files no problem and also when she playes avi files through windows media player the sound is perfect..any ideas would be grateful..thanks in advance
it depends on the resolution of the movie, and the operating system. For my netbook running windows XP, VLC will play anything up to 720p smoothly. The same video under ubuntu (my preferred os) with VLC is unwatchable. You could try enabling Hardware Acceleration in VLC, although its still a bit rough. Might help though. You could also try using a codec pack such as K-Lite codec pack and see if windows media player can play it back any smoother. Its also worth trying a different media player, such as 'media player classic'.
I've had some trouble with it on my old laptop but its become a lot smoother after changing a few things. Skip frames under video settings. With this on I think it will drop out frames from some videos so the audio track doesn't get too much out of sync but this can cause it to show too few frames and then it looks very rough. I always use the gpu acceleration, never had any issues with it yet. Depending on the video the de-interlace mode can be important I tend to run it in yadif 2x. Although, it does seem to cause some issues with dvd menu's ie. it won't show up again at the end of the film but I don't think its too much of a problem. You could try the option to use system codecs but I haven't tried it and the other things I've mentioned solved it for me.
Instead of K-Lite Codec Pack, you would be much better off installing ffdshow if you have XP, or if you have Windows 7, use Shark007.
