Crimson Red Sports

I get some jumpiness.  I know there are settings to help it.  As you would expect the jumpiness is more the larger the movie file.  720P and up movies I cant watch from my external drive due to the jumpiness.  So I suspect it's a cache issue.  I pushed the cashe up in several of the options and It might have worked better.

Discuss.

BTW.  I have over 400 movies and documentaries.

Is the external drive USB or e-SATA?

USB and runs through a router and is shared by all the computers in the house.  I know I am pushing it to play movies from it.  It works really well for regular DVD's (~700MB each), and then gets worse as the quality goes up.  With 1080P (~4.5G each) not working very well at all.  So then I copy them over to the HD if they wont play well, that works for the 720P (~2.2G each) but still have occasional issues with the full 1080P blue ray.  I have not tried to burn them to a disc and play them yet.

Before I make any suggestions, I don't want to offend you by making suggestions that are below your level of understanding of computers. So how competent would you consider yourself when it comes to hardware, networking, etc?

Medium...  I grew up on computers, but they have passed me by in the last 10 years or so.  Back in the good old days I was a master at writing config.sys and autoexec.bat's for people so they could play certain games.  LOL.

Dont worry about offending me, but also you dont have to waste any time providing any background or simple stuff, etc...

Does that make sense?

Couple questions:

1. 100 base or gigabit network?

2. Video card model?

3. Processor?

4. Memory (specifically amount and front side bus)?

5. Hard drive speed and cache?

I'm not on that computer right now, but I will get it out right now.

Ok, I am on the computer now, stand by for better answers.

1   I dont know where to find this...
2   ATI Mobility Radeon 4250
3   AMD Phenom II N870 Triple Core 2.3 Mhz
4   Installed Physical Memory (RAM)   6.00 GB
     Total Physical Memory   5.75 GB
     Available Physical Memory   4.55 GB
     Total Virtual Memory   11.5 GB
     Available Virtual Memory   10.0 GB
     Page File Space   5.75 GB

5   For the computer or the external?  I dont know how to find either.

Is this a laptop?

correct

What is the external drive plugged in to?

A belkin N+ router

Are you streaming over wireless or wired?

wireless

When you stream over the wireless, you are running into a bandwidth problem in the higher resolution files. They require more data to be passed per second than the smaller resolution. That is why you see better performance when you pull them down locally onto the laptop or are running DVD quality files. If you were to plug into the network with a wired connection you would be fine.

The second scenario where you can't seem to get the 1080P files to play even when they are on your local hard drive is most likely caused by the video card. With this being a laptop there isn't much that you can do about that, but there are two things I would check. First, make sure you have the latest and greatest driver for that particular card. Second, try allocating more memory to the card through your BIOS settings. I would put 1 gb towards it myself. They claim that card should be "sufficient" to play HD quality stuff, but I have run in to a similar problem myself and unfortunately sometimes they just don't live up to the hype.

Sorry if that wasn't the result you were hoping for, but aside from double checking a couple other things in person I can't see any other reasons why you would be having that problem.

Cool thanks, I will try the memory thing.

I have to watch mine on 380 if I don't it takes forever to download. RTR!

That's another thing.  I have a program that can change file types, but they always come out the same size.  So, basically I guess I dont know how to work it.  It's called Freemake video converter.  I got it from download.com and it's freeware.

Never heard of that one, but in general I consider freeware to be somewhat useless. Just my opinion though. I am sure there are plenty of freeware apps out there that are great for a specific purpose, but if it were good enough it would be worth selling.