Playing M2TS files?

I copied a bunch of videos off my friend's sony HD camcorder in M2TS format, and I can't seem to get them to play smoothly on my laptop. I've tried playing them in WMP and my standard player, the latest version of VLC, but in both cases the video starts smooth for about 3 seconds and then the video starts stuttering badly while the audio remains smooth. Is it simply a case of not having a strong enough processor, or can I find a different codec pack or something that will allow me to enjoy the movies at full resolution smoothly? (I have a T7500 @ 2.2ghz, 4 gigs of ram, and an 8600M GT DDR3 in my M1530, running Vista X86)

 

You could try following this guide and see if it fixes the playback.

I have not tried using that guide but I do have the same problem as you. I've ripped some of my HD DVDs to my hard drive and used software to create *.TS or *.MT2S files from them. They are quite large and full 1080P. Even though my M1530 is decently spec'd out (same processor as you, actually), the playback is extremely choppy in VLC.

I've been using XBMC to play my movies and it handles the 1080P content without any issues. XBOX Media Center isn't really a good alternative to VLC, though, since it's meant to be more of a library management program. It doesn't offer the advantage of being able to click on a file and start watching it within seconds. The playback is flawless, though, which is great. We've got the same processor so yours will also be more than capable of playing full HD video.

Good luck getting the playback to smooth out! Hopefully that guide will help you out. If not, I'm sure we could find another one that will work.

 

Luckily for win7 users MTS and M2TS files are natively supported in WMP.
DXVA is also offloading the decoding to the gpu

 

Try using MPC-HC. VLC uses DXVA in a much more processor-intensive manner than other implementations due to the way it wants to read data back from the video card.