intel HD graphics - i5 - issues with fullscreen video movie

Hi all,

I just wanted to share my experience with my new laptop with you.

It's a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 with the i5 chipset, featuring the intel HD graphics.

I'm running WIN XP and while the laptop is generally great, I have noticed that videos / movies do not play properly in fullscreen.

The framerate drops significantly the larger I make the windows size and if I put it to fullscreen, the movie runs so slow / choppy and skips so that it's like watching a photo slideshow and it cannot keep up with the sound.

It happens with streamed video (e.g. YouTube, DivX, Flash, etc.) and even with DivX movie files that are saved on my hard drive.

I've searched online for the problem and it looks like quite a few other people on other laptop models (even Mac's) are having similar issues with the intel HD graphics chipset.

Has anyone figured out a solution for this yet?

I'm using the very latest drivers from intel and also the very latest players/codecs/etc.

Thanks for your help!

 

My T410 with the same hardware combo as yours but, with windows 7 32 bit OS has none of the above issues you seem to be suffering from.
I remember one of the other forum members, "talin" I think, suffered the same slow frame rates with games with XP as the OS. But once he upgraded to windows 7 the problems went away.

 

this is due to software issue where the video decoding is done not by GPU hardware acceleration.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a result of the drivers for the intel hd graphics being worse on windows xp.

This makes sense though, windows xp is very old now. Why are you still running xp? Proper versions of windows 7 come with xp compatibility. You could be enjoying smooth video playback and still use the xp compatibility to run any legacy applications.

 

Don't let Vista fool you, 7 is great. No need to go to XP

 

Vista is actually not so bad, especially after SP2.

 

Sounds like the ole' flash hardware acceleration problem. However if this were the case I think it would only affect streamed videos but perhaps it might affected disk based content depending upon the player being used.

Any for a flash video playing in a browser, try the following:

Mouse over the video
Right click
Select Settings from the flash menu that appears
Uncheck Enable Hardware Acceleration

Watch your problem disappear (hopefully)

 

Install Flash 10.1 release candidate to fix flash performance issues.

 

I don't know for sure, but cmon guys...this isn't being caused by inefficient Flash Video. My Core 2 Duo from 2007 can handle 1080P Full screen without any accceleration

 

Some Flash files can slow down the laptop more than a 1080p can.

Also, the Penryn cpu have the required SSE for decoding 1080p movies, even without the GPU hardware acceleration support.

 

I meant 1080P flash videos (from Youtube). The C2D i'm referring to is the E6420, 2.13ghz, Conroe core.

 

which GPU were you using?

 

It has a ATI 4670, but that shouldn't be relevant because I use Flash Player 10 which doesn't support any acceleration.

 

but doesn't the Flash player 10 use the GPU processing power through Direct X?

 

Well I think GPU acceleration through Direct X (useful for games) is a separate function than GPU acceleration for H264 video (not available in Flash 10). Something that is very specifically mentioned in the 10.1 RC release notes.

 

Hardware acceleration in the GPU definitely helps with the decoding of certain high definition videos, including the flash sites such as YouTube. Since the Intel GMA 4500MHD (around since the T400) it should be able to handle HD videos (MPEG2, VC-1 & AVC) with full hardware acceleration support. Therefore the Core i5 and Intel GMA HD combination should work without a hitch, I would guess the Intel drivers on XP is not as efficient to that of Windows 7.

My T61 has the Intel GMA X3100 and since it doesn't support AVC (H264 Advanced Video Coding) acceleration and motion compensates VC-1 (Microsoft WMV HD codec) it fares really badly on HD playback. My friend's Dell XT2 had the Intel GMA 4500MHD chipset and was able to playback the same video without problem when we were comparing at the time. Oh and both use Windows 7 as our operating system.

 

whatever the case, i definitely do notice a difference in watching hd movies when using different graphics card in Flash 10 with the same CPU.