How to Play 1080p HD Video Encoded with x264 in an MKV Container

[rajeesh]

Full 1080p HD video in x264/H.264 is notoriously difficult to properly decode, due to both its enormous resolution and high compression. The fact that a huge number of these videos are stored in MKV containers doesn't help the situation, mostly because some common video players don't read MKVs as optimally as possible.

The past few years have seen a plateau in terms of CPU clockspeed, so we haven't been able to rely on ever-increasing processing power to solve the problem. Instead we have to be smart about how we play our HD videos, by moving decoding to our video cards or splitting the work across multiple cores.

This article contains a few tips to play your HD videos the right way (or at least the best ways I've found to date). I've labeled the article with 1080p, but these suggestions work just as well with 720p HD video or lower.

Read the full article at source:

Source

[bsvols]

Not too impressed with the original author's thoughts on this.I have always found H.264 to be such an easy HD format to deal with ( as opposed to some massive HD format like MPEG 2). This article is three and one-half years old, and long before it was written (early spring of 2009), even very basic home desktop computers were made that were capable of playing the HD media described with any one of many free media players -BSPlayer, GOM Player, RealPlayer, etc.- with no problems. They could even have some other programs running in the background and have no problems. I still own a Compaq Presario SR1920 from spring of 2006 with which I did just that - play H.264 videos (as soon as they were available - not sure exactly when that was) while Kaspersky or Avast was scanning away in the background, with never a stumble. I even occasionally watched one video while RealPlayer Pro or Wondershare was encoding another video INTO H.264 from some other format. Just shows that many things found on the internet are not that accurate.