rendered m2t on Vista failing - help pls

tbodin wrote on 5/29/2008, 11:24 AM

Looking for some quick advice here as I am up against a tight timeline.....

I am using V7 to create a 10 minute HDV 1080i splash video to show at an event next Monday. Working fine on my XP desktop driving my projector but when I haul the .m2t file to a Vista laptop with an HDMI port, Vista WMP11 chokes on the .m2t saying it cannot recognize the file. I tried renaming .m2t to .mpg as noted by some online but I get the same message.

Do I need to use a different codec, or go to .wmv, or ? How can I get an excellent quality HD stream onto this Vista laptop to project across HDMI?

Apprec your advice. If I cant solve this in next day I will need to pull the plug and drop back to NTSC widescreen DVD.

Tim

Comments

jrazz wrote on 5/29/2008, 12:06 PM

It could be that you don't have enough horses under the hood to power the high definition file on the laptop. What is your graphics card? CPU speed? Amount of RAM?

I would assume that your graphics card was just whatever was built into the laptop and when trying to output it via hdmi it chokes as it cannot handle it with everything else running. Have you tried turning off your laptop monitor and only displaying it out the hdmi port? Have you shut down your antivirus (if you have it), your background programs and anything else that may interfere with it?

Also, if you load it on your Vegas timeline on the laptop, does it play fine there?

j razz

tbodin wrote on 5/29/2008, 2:35 PM

Thanks for your comments J....

I was able to solve it with another hour or two of digging. It was a codec problem. I found and downloaded a package of free codecs you can find with search string "K-Lite codecs". The package apparently installs a whole slew of codecs in one pass. It also installs a "Media Player Classic" - which looks like an older MS version but may not be.

Anyway, the new Media Player Classic plays the .m2t files fine, and even WMP11 is behaving fine now too. Not sure which codec did the trick but something did.

Also for any interested folks, the laptop is a ~$550 Gateway version I bought from BB to use for HD projn, in lieu of getting into BlueRay burners and players. Just seems too early and immature to get into that if an inexpensive laptop can bridge the gap. Its a not-overpowered Turion processor with a 5400 rpm drive and HDMI out. Aside from the fact that it doesnt send my preferred res from the X1270 ATI card (1368x768), my projector seems to accept the 1920x1080 maximum and display it with nice downconvert all 1080i and no apparent artifacts.

It seems the BB sales mgr I talked to (very bright guy, quite impressive) was correct that this inexpensive laptop probably would handle HD better than the 3 year old AMD 3800 X2 video editing / htpc desktop I built. It indeed seems smoother handling the .m2t files. I am projecting synchronized swimming stuff with close action shots, so all the water splashes and ripples are murder exposing any real time decode weaknesses.

Again, thanks for your comments J,

Tim