Avi video help.
 

I'm having problems playing specific .avi's on my laptop, i downloaded some episodes of the sopranos, and they work fine on my desktop, but they run really strange on my laptop. The screen kinda pulsates, kinda skips like the actors are possesed. It actually looks really funny, but is not that pleasent to watch. The audio is fine, but the frames tend to jump. I have all the same codecs installed on both computers, and using the same media viewer (i also tried different programs, dvix, WMP, winamp) so if anyone has had this problem before, give me your insight. Thanks.

What video is in the laptop?

Maybe your laptop is too slow to play compressed video.

hrm, maybe it is too slow. It's a 1.2 ghz, some shitty video card, 256 ram, its about 1 1/2 years old.

depending on the vidcard, that setup in your laptop should be more than sufficient to play any compressed video smoothly.

my desktop is thus:
AMD Athlon 750mhz
256mg of pc100 ram
ATI Radeon 7500
OS: Win98se

and I have no trouble whatsoever with video of any kind playing smoothly.

I would suspect one of two things:

either your vidcard really is shitty (a distinct possibility)
or
have you got a shitload of processes running in the background? this will be especially problematic if you are running WinXP on a mere 256 mb of ram. try shutting down everything before playing the video and see what happens.

also, are both systems running the same OS?

Laptop is basicly for music and word processing only, and internet. Nothing is ever really going on in the background. I'll try playing around with a few things, see if i can get it to run better. Yeah, both systems are on the same OS. I'll get back to you.

So, i just finished season 1 of the sopranos, and started watching the second. Strangly, it's working fine. So i guess my laptop and the codec that was used to compress the first season didnt jive. So all is good as of now.

If its Xvid, i've had the same problem, it takes a reinstall of the newest codec... your best option for playing ALL media though is www.k-litecodecpack.com it has latest xvid, divx, and lots of extra goodies if you get the full "mega" pack.

sometimes an update to your ffdshow will fix problems like that. this is particularly true if the codec is xvid.