HDTV (atsc) playback from my laptop

[teststrips]

I've been having a bugger of a time trying to find a combo of codecs and overlay settings to play recorded HD content.

Most everything simply studders and plays back the v-v-v-i-i-d-d-d-e-e-o-o very slowly. Cyberlink decoders (from V5 disk I have) play back almost normally, but the longer I watch, the longer the audio is ahead of video - easily goes to 5 seconds off in 15 minutes.

My hardware:
IBM T40 Laptop - has ATI Mobility radeon 7500 card - 1.6 gig processor + 512 megs of ram. The 7500 product page on ati's website mentions hardware acceleration for HDTV playback... I don't think I've found anything to utilize that yet.

Nvidia has the Purevideo decoders to utilize hardware decoding... does ATI have somthign similar and/or is there a 3rd party codec that seems to work better than another with ATI hardware?

Am I asking too much from my humble laptop to play this content??

[sub]

Am I asking too much from my humble laptop to play this content??

Possibly - particularly with that video card.

All I cant suggest is trying different video decoders, also try the Overlay renderer, and hopefully you'll find a combination that works well enough to watch. I'm not sure if that video card has any, but also make sure the video decoder has hardware accelleration enabled.

[bckappen]

Try this: Keep Cyberlink as your video decoder, but switch the audio decoder to your direct sound option.

[teststrips]

cyberlink def does pretty well playing the content back, but I was watching stuff without much motion. I've just tried playing a recording with more motion + it wasn't too pretty.

I tried getting a newer version of cyberlink, but didn't have too much luck.

I played a bit with a program called WinFF that I saw mentioned here for something else... set it up to re-encode at a lower framerate and the output file is now playable.

So is there an automated way that I can re-encode my shows... I know its lower quality, but I like the smaller filesizes, and also like the fact that I can now play the content on my laptop.

[HtV]

I guess you can do that in gbpvr-config-processing. If you want to transcode to a lower bitrate you would have to add a mpeg2 conversion line to config.xml. But you could of course transcode to xvid e.g. The filesize would be much lower and maybe (I don't know) it is played better by your laptop. Maybe you wouldn't even have to loose much quality.
Just try it out.