Hello.

Ive been having a bit of an issue playing videos in Vista (home premium). Despite having a reasonably advanced machine with dual core 4200 processor, 2 gig of ram, and a Radeon X1950 Pro, when I play videos, the visual seems to lag behind the audio.

The videos play fine, but occasionally, its like the visualisation has slowed down and no longer matches the audio, but then rapidly speeds up and whooshes through the missing frames in order to catch up again. A couple minutes later it does this again. It happens most often in Windows Media player (usually with avi files), although it also happens on some websites like Collegehumor...although not flash.

Can anyone recommend any way of fixing this? Ive downloaded the latest graphics drivers, my media player is fully up to date, my virus scanner is fully up to date and not finding anything, and its still doing it. What else is there that I can do?

All help gratefully appreciated!

Are these files on t'net or saved on your hard drive?

Saved to my hard drive.

What are you using to play them? Use VLC Media player, it comes with pretty much all codecs you might need, it sounds like a codec problem.

Does every file do it?

Your machine while being quite an old spec, should have no problem in playing any video file, including high def stuff.

Update your soundcard drivers as well, although its more likely to be a codec problem.

It never even occured to me to try playing in Winamp...for some reason I always seem to use Windows MP for video and Winamp for audio. I just gave it a wee bash in Winamp, and it doesnt seem to do it in that, so you might have been spot on in your diagnosis, cheers!

So is there any way to update codecs in Windows Media Player?

Windows media is pretty crappy.

The best video player is VideoLans VLC Player.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ <--- This is the only thing you will ever need.

Sounds like it may be a hardware acceleration issue within Media Player. Try right clicking anywhere along the top bar (above where Now Playing and Library etc are) and select Tools > Options.

Click on the performance tab and try reducing the Video Acceleration on the slider. I had a similar issue before and this solution worked for me.

Don't you mean "the Gray Ghost has been having a bit of an issue..." or have you stopped that pish?

Just to stray back on topic so it doesn't look like yet another infamous P&B witchhunt, VLC Player is indeed the dogs nads.

apparently vista doesn't like VLC player too much.

The Gray Ghost was too hungover to keep it up consistently.

Will probably download and look at vlc player later on, so will report back.

Its fine on my 4 pc's and vista.